How your team ships is a design decision.
I can help you shape it.
Throughout my career, I have sat in the margins of what engineering builds and how anyone else comes to understand it.
As a result, I’ve founded an accessibility program across 647 pages and 8 writers with no mandate, partnered cross-team to build AI tooling that scaled mobile component documentation from 3 hours to 30 minutes per component, and redesigned release operations for a remote team coordinating across 120+ data products.
Most recently, I’ve been exploring how to encode documentation philosophy and editorial judgement into resuable systems.
I fill the margins by creating what belongs there, for the people that need it.
Why care about design standards and communication systems?
“Can’t AI generate and automate these processes and systems without humans?”
Yes, it can, and it will keep getting better.
What is left for us to untangle are the elements of design that are inherently human:
Discernment, Intuition, and Desire.
They are what determine whether something gets trusted or dismissed, merely tolerated or coveted. Anything can shine if you polish it hard enough. But creating something that people actually want requires reading the room, earning trust and deciding on a process that can hold all of that abstract information together.
I turn tacit wisdom into shared knowledge. Everything I build is in service of that.
Here’s how I’ll contribute to your team
Anywhere I go, you can trust that I will:
- Find the gap that everyone’s been shuffling around.
- Earn trust by learning what you built before proposing what to change.
- Establish sustainable standards where they don’t exist.
- Ensure no one gets left behind through the last mile.
How do you approach your work?
Accessibility matters deeply to me. I’ve always known that how something is designed determines who gets to participate. Improving accessibility raises the quality standard for everyone, because it shapes how all of us experience the world at different points in our lives.
To determine what to build and mend, I go directly to the source. I’ve walked Amazon warehouses to understand life on the floor and taken robotics equipment apart myself. I’ll set up a simulator to test components and close my eyes to listen to the voiceover of content I’m working on. People confide in you more when they can tell you genuinely care about their predicament.
The caring is what makes me a good translator. My first job was translating jazz master classes for professors from the Rotterdam Conservatory teaching in Korea. It turns out, the same skill applies between groups of people who speak the same natural language, even more so between a product and a user. How we use language is a direct reflection of the care and consideration we have for one another. Every system I design starts there.
Most of all, I like to leave things better than I found them. When I build something, I want it to age well, enough that whoever inherits it can make it even better.
So… Who are you?
I’m Andie.
I was born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Outside of work, you can find me at the beach with a paperback or barricaded in front of large sound systems. I live in San Francisco, with my cat, Sesame.
