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Hire Dr.Dr. Don Levan
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Location
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, United States
Toptal Member Since
August 25, 2020
Dr. Don is a technical product manager and designer with 15 years of experience. Dr. Don is also a licensed clinical psychologist, former photojournalist, and former developer. This combination of experience means that he is an expert at eliciting user needs, conceptualization, and synthesis and is highly skilled leading teams of engineers and designers. He enjoys freelancing as it continually introduces him to new people and domains.
Project Highlights
Lifion by ADP's Design System
Partnered with UX leads to implement Lifion's design system. Coordinated designers and managed two teams of engineers (New York, Israel, and India), a 3-month beta, and a rollout to internal teams and external clients—on schedule with no downtime.
FileMaker Script Workspace (now Claris FileMaker)
MacWorld said: "The most welcomed change in FileMaker Pro is likely to be the redesigned and renamed 'script workplace'—in particular, the ability to enter scripts almost entirely from the keyboard... FileMaker adepts are going to love it."
Expertise
Work Experience
Founder, Producer, Content Developer, and Instructor
2020 - PRESENT
The Business Design Studio
- Helped new entrepreneurs design, test, learn, and change as they conduct research, validate their ideas, create their value propositions, and earn customers.
- Created eight learning modules shared over eight weeks.
- Facilitated two 120 minutes of online cohort meetings per week.
- Planned, designed, and implemented the permission marketing campaign.
Founder, Product Manager and Designer, Software Developer
2005 - PRESENT
Dr. Don Levan Consulting
- Designed, managed, and developed internal and consumer-facing desktop, web, mobile, and voice UI projects for a diverse set of companies. Client industries included healthcare, IT, tax, legislative advocacy, media, nonprofit, and small business.
- Conducted product design and user experience training for product and engineering teams at companies in the Fortune 250 and the Fortune 50.
- Facilitated product and business planning design sprints for startups.
- Conducted interviews, group discovery workshops, document reviews, and ethnographic research to elicit and understand users' needs. Conceptualized and synthesized those needs into product vision and technical recommendations.
Director of Product Management
2018 - 2020
Gerson Lehrman Group, Inc. (GLG)
- Designed and managed the delivery of technologies to identify and mitigate fraud and compliance issues negatively impacting clients' trust and satisfaction, resulting in a significant decrease in the time required to identify and mitigate fraud.
- Created tools to aggregate risk signals to help the compliance team prioritize and focus their screening efforts.
- Implemented tools that significantly improved GLG's ability to screen council members.
Senior Solutions Architect (Technical Product Manager)
2015 - 2018
Lifion, by ADP
- Led a team of designers and two teams of engineers (in New York, Israel, and India—30 people in total) to implement Lifion’s first design system and a new suite of UI components. The year-long project was delivered on schedule with zero downtime.
- Architected and led the product vision, strategic direction, and implementation of the front-end UI components of ADP's new Global HCM platform.
- Established the foundation to support client branding and geographic theming.
- Partnered with Lifion by ADP's head of UX and UX leads.
- Facilitated the creation of close working relationships between teams of geographically, culturally, and organizationally separated engineers and designers.
Founder, Producer, Content Developer, and Instructor
2010 - 2018
The Design Better Products Workshop
- Developed, designed, and facilitated two and three-day intensive design studios which taught a formal design and product management process to software developers.
- Developed detailed case studies consisting of interviews with multiple user types, user journeys, and other qualitative and quantitative research artifacts.
- Designed experiential exercises, activities, and learning materials to accommodate different student learning styles.
User Experience Designer | Claris FileMaker Design Team
2012 - 2013
Apple, Inc.
- Re-designed the FileMaker platform's scripting editor to make it behave more like a text editor, while still supporting the macro-based language. This decreased learning time for novice builders and increased the productivity of advanced developers.
- Designed the new custom styles functionality. The new functionality enabled FileMaker builders to quickly design interfaces that are clean, polished, and consistent with end-user expectations.
- Created the FileMaker platform onboarding guide, which orients new users to the FileMaker platform and encourages established users to extend their development efforts to iOS and the browser.
- Wrote the interaction design guide for the FileMaker platform. The guide provides builders actionable steps to improve their solution design and a framework for reviewing solutions to ensure interaction design best practices.
Founder, Producer, and Speaker
2012 - 2012
Experience & Style: The Design Conference for Software Developers
- Developed and produced a design conference, helping software developers to improve their design process and technique.
- Planned the workshop schedule, secured the facilities, recruited the speakers, and presented multiple sessions.
- Planned, designed, and implemented marketing for the conference.
User Experience Designer and Custom Software Developer
2007 - 2010
Tekserve
- Designed and developed major areas of the custom application that managed the New York City's premiere Apple Reseller and Service provider’s inventory, rentals, sales, and service.
- Planned and executed the migration to a new software platform. This was a six-month project which involved three weeks of user acceptance and quality assurance testing. The final transition was made on a scheduled holiday with no additional downtime.
- Re-designed and rebuilt a series of outdated and brittle payment processes into a new modern, scalable, and flexible payment architecture.
Clinical Psychologist, User Experience Designer, and Software Developer
2002 - 2010
YAI National Institute for People with Disabilities
- Designed, developed, and maintained a clinical documentation and management system utilized by a staff of more than 200 clinicians and administrators for 10 years.
- Decreased the time required to maintain documentation and significantly reduced errors.
- Performed clinical, administrative, and supervisory work in this specialty medical clinic for people with developmental disabilities.
- Helped plan and executed the transition to an enterprise electronic health record.
Custom Software Developer and User Experience Designer
2005 - 2007
Small Company
- Designed and developed custom desktop and web applications for clients including Harvard University Press, New York University, the New York Public Library, and the Miami Ad School.
- Conducted interviews, document reviews, and ethnographic research to elicit and understand users' needs. Conceptualized and synthesized those needs into product vision.
- Translated product vision into actionable plans and shipped products.
Project History
Lifion by ADP's Design System
Partnered with UX leads to implement Lifion's design system. Coordinated designers and managed two teams of engineers (New York, Israel, and India), a 3-month beta, and a rollout to internal teams and external clients—on schedule with no downtime.
Project outcomes: Replaced the open-source components Lifion had used to bootstrap development with a modern, scalable, modular, and tokenized styling system; established the foundation to support client branding and geographic theming; polished every UX component; implemented the design team’s new layout, color, and typography guidelines.
FileMaker Script Workspace (now Claris FileMaker)
https://www.claris.com/filemaker/MacWorld said: "The most welcomed change in FileMaker Pro is likely to be the redesigned and renamed 'script workplace'—in particular, the ability to enter scripts almost entirely from the keyboard... FileMaker adepts are going to love it."
Project outcomes: Re-designed the FileMaker platform's scripting editor to make it look and behave more like a text editor, while still supporting the underlying macro-based language; decreased the learning curve for novice builders; increased the productivity and efficiency of advanced developers.
The Advocacy Institute’s Legislative Directory — The Insiders Tool for Outsiders
http://hi.advocacy-institute.org/Armed with the documentation and prototypes created in this project, the Advocacy Institute was able to secure funding, hire a development team, and launch the application.
I designed and prototyped a web application to provide necessary information to influence targets and secure and schedule meetings necessary to win legislative campaigns to grass-root organizations that cannot afford lobbyists.
YAI National Institute for People with Disabilities | NextGen EHR Implementation
https://www.yai.org/Enabled the transition from a custom internal built electronic health record (EHR) to an enterprise EHR by documenting and designing the clinical workflows, specialty interfaces, and requirements for this multi-clinic New York City medical system.
I facilitated individual interviews and group workshops, conducted onsite observation, and documented the workflows of each of the medical and clinical specialties of this multi-clinic New York City medical system. I designed custom interfaces and workflows for the intake and triaged teams to enable YAI's high standard of care while meeting complex regulator requirements in the least amount of elapsed time.
Education
2020 - 2020
altMBA40 Orca Cohort in Leadership
Seth Godin's altMBA - Remote from New York
1996 - 2001
Doctor of Psychology Degree in Clinical Psychology
Nova Southeastern University, Center for Psychological Studies - Fort Lauderdale, Florida
1990 - 1992
Bachelor of Science Degree in Photojournalism
University of Florida, College of Journalism - Gainesville, Florida
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