Dennis Covington

Purple Wave | Manhattan, KS | Product Design Manager

9/24 - Present

Brought in to help modernize product design and contribute to a broader digital transformation initiative focused on scaling the company’s platform, improving user experience, and enabling more data-informed decision making.

• Lead the Product Design function across both customer-facing and internal platforms, supporting a complex auction marketplace serving agricultural and industrial equipment sectors.

• Built and mentored a high-performing design team, elevating design quality, strengthening cross-functional collaboration, and establishing a more structured, growth-oriented design culture.

• Drove the creation and rollout of Waveform, a unified design system that addressed legacy design inconsistencies and established a scalable foundation for modern product development across web and internal tools.

• Introduced and operationalized contemporary product design practices, including design thinking frameworks, improved workflows, and closer integration with Product and Engineering to increase delivery speed and consistency.

• Partnered with senior stakeholders to align design strategy with evolving business priorities, contributing to early-stage efforts to leverage data and emerging technologies to improve efficiency and user experience.

• Operated effectively in a rapidly evolving environment, helping guide teams through shifting priorities while maintaining focus on long-term product and experience improvements.

Employbridge | Atlanta, GA | UX Design Manager

8/23 - 2/24

Managed the Design team within an internal consultancy group which provided comprehensive services in Data Architecture, User Research, Product Design, and UI Engineering to drive enterprise-level solutions within the company.

• Provided leadership, mentorship, and guidance to a team of Product Designers to enhance their skills and deepen their professional maturity.

• Developed and refined policies and processes to ensure alignment and efficiency across teams and departments.

• Oversaw the Design team effort to audit, catalog and organize all elements of our UI design language towards the development of a Design System for all customer and employee facing products.

• Lead the adoption of the enterprise wide Product Design best practices, standards, principles, and design thinking processes for use by the respective UX Design, Product, and Engineering teams; served as an advocate for these standards, principles and processes.

• Collaborated closely with engineering and business teams in the planning of new features and projects, ensuring alignment with customer needs.

The Container Store | Coppell, TX | UX & Product Design Manager

11/19 - 5/23

As the Head of a dynamic User Experience team comprising both on-site and remote talent, I led the delivery of research-backed and user-tested product solutions that aligned with crucial company objectives.

• Developed a UX Design process crafted to accommodate the unique needs of our internal business units helping to greatly improve efficiency and effectiveness in product development.

• Mentored Designers on how to interpret and integrate user research into their designs and work closely with A/B testers and analytic experts to craft design solutions designed to positively evolve our digital business experience.

• Managed the launch of several product initiatives including: new native checkout, new online scheduling experience, new loyalty on-boarding, order fulfillment optimization, upgraded CMS and online site templates.

Publicis Hawkeye | DALLAS, TX | ASSOCIATE USER EXPERIENCE DIRECTOR

9/10 - 11/19

Delivered comprehensive UX research, strategic planning, and effective direction for a diverse portfolio of ecommerce, transactional, and marketing interactive projects for clients such as Terminix, TruGreen, Disney and Lexmark.

• Provided UX oversight on all agency interactive projects effectively engaging with agency peer leadership to foster active collaboration across the teams, remove impediments, and ensure delivery of the overall experience, vision & OKRs.

• Translated customer insights and UX architecture into tangible design deliverables which created engaging and intuitive digital experiences that presented best-in-class visual and brand design.

• Acted as manager for the User Experience department, working with senior staff to maintain appropriate resource distribution across digital projects as well as perform other leadership duties including, but not limited to, organizing and prioritizing projects, conducting performance reviews and managing work performance.

• Mentored UX Design team to design innovative and compelling user experiences and corresponding deliverables: wireframes, information architecture diagrams, user flows, comps, and prototypes.