Experience Highlights

  • 20+ years in design leadership

  • Breadth of industries: Recruiting, Retail, FSS, Communication + Ai

  • Scaled 4 design orgs - with director and manager reports

  • Team sizes from 3 - 40+ across US, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC

  • Involved in digital transformation at 3 companies

  • Scaled 5 Design systems

    • 50-80% adoption

    • Millions of $ saved in ops

    • Sped time to market

    • Enabled experimentation

My Journey

I began my career with formal education in Graphic Design as a visual designer.

Starting out in the design world, I stepped into web design and frontend development as an intern and learned how to transition my education of design theory for print into design for web.

I acquired the skills along the way to hand-code semantic, standards-compliant markup.

As my career progressed, and the world of web evolved in the 2000’s, I learned the discipline of user experience, performing information architecture and interaction design where my insight and intuition lead me to take on that role. 

Through the years, I developed a passion for leading teams and participating as an executive leader of design org’s.

I’ve had the opportunity to bridge the sometimes very separate worlds of business, product design, and development. Growing design organizations as well as coaching individuals and bridging cross-functional teams to enable closer collaboration have become close to my heart as much as being involved in creating great design.


Talks, Podcasts, Articles…

Nicole Torgersen on Product Design, Design Careers, Leadership, Challenges, and More — Wrike Pyjama Talks

Teresa Aguilera & Nicole Torgersen: “Partnership & Trust to Fuel Growth” — Clarity 2019

How Gap Inc. learns by using fast feedback — Invision Genome Project


My Personal Story

Early Days

If you’ve read about me so far, you know that I’m a design leader - I went to college in the ‘90’s and received a degree in traditional Graphic Design - UX and Product Design wasn’t a thing but I knew I wanted to go into digital, so I forged my own path. I Iearned the hard way through my first internship with Interior Design to test the waters before committing, and that’s how I found Graphic Design, and my first internship (which was the fruit of my labor courageously cold-calling businesses asking to hang with them for free). Spoiler: It worked and I learned to never fear the unknown!

Close call with Baby #1

As I worked my way into proper adulthood, and met my husband, we yearned to have a family. I at the time was a Creative Director in a high-stress job and happened to learn that job stress equals bodily stress and lack of balance. We tried for 3 years to conceive a baby, and that only happened when I drew the line in the sand and put my Blackberry in my hotel safe to spend some time on the beach relaxing. My first son Jack was conceived yay! BUT… I soon found I have a pre-existing condition that meant I needed to have a controversial surgery, then stay on bed rest for most of my pregnancy or I’d loose the baby. To say I lost my SH*T when I found that out is an understatement. I however mustered my inner grit and continued to lead a UX team of 15 from my bed until I was just about ready to have the baby. He’s amazing by the way, the most kind, smart, lovable human you’ll meet (and he looks like me!)

Oh and my husband Ed has seriously earned father of the year award having served me hand and foot for 5 months while I was forced to stay in bed. Good times.

Two years later, we repeated the cycle, having surgery again, but I had a mostly normal pregnancy that brought us the enigmatic, empathetic boy we named Axel.

Transgender news & a heart attack

I failed to mention that my husband, Ed, has a son from his first marriage. Ed and I met in the early 2000’s, a few months after his son was born, so I’ve helped raise Eli since he was just a wee thing. And in the early days, that wee thing was named “Hannah” - that’s right - their assigned gender at birth was female. It took about 16 years for the person we know and love as Eli, found himself and came out as transgender. Coming out was painful though - he felt he had to hide himself away from the world for a very long time, which lead to self-harm, body dismorphya, and annorexia. He didn’t feel safe telling anyone. Until he did, he told his mother, who kicked him out - he was terrified to tell us so he was essentially homeless for a few weeks before deciding to try to end it all with vodka and pills. Fortunately he survived and got treatment, I then stepped in, took over his treatment and we helped him graduate high school. Eli is an amazingly smart, conscientous person, you’ve never met a better human being. He didn’t deserve any of this, but here we are. His journey is still happening but his transition is mostly done - he’s on hormone therapy, had top surgery and decided against gender re-affirming surgery. He is Eli - strong, proud, resilient, queer and proud of it all. We love him to the core.

Early in Eli’s transition, Ed had a major heart attack - a STEMI heart attack - his right coronary artery was fully blocked. We came within minutes of losing him. Fortunately he survived but if you don’t know, heart attacks are difficult to recover from, if one is lucky enough to have minimal heart and brain damage, they then suffer from crushing anxiety. Ed suffered all three and our lives haven’t been the same since but he is also a super reslient person and we’re forging a path together while raising our two young boys. When the path moves on you, you move with it and adjust your point of view.

Autism

Remember when I said Jack is super smart? Well, last year he was diagnosed with Autism, Aspergers Syndrome to be exact. We helped him understand how he has an amazing superpower in his brain - like Einstein - did you know Einstein was Autistic? Look it up, many great minds were or are Autistic. We don’t see this as a negative thing, but we are still learning how to help Jack build empathy, notice social cues, and stop quizzing his brother on geography during dinner ;)

Since the diagnoses, we’ve come to realize that both Ed and Eli are also Autistic, that answers a lot of questions for us.

It’s still a journey, and helped me learn that we are all neurodivergent - that’s why it’s called “the spectrum”, you know. And - keep in mind neurodivergence is mostly invisible to the human eye.

Why have I shared this with you?

Because these events shaped my growth as a human, they’ve taught me to be humble, empathetic, patient, open-minded, loving, kind, to set boundaries, take care of my health and mindfulness - and to treat each person with loving kindness.

Life is a journey, we are all learning and growing every day - embrace your path, be authentic and true to yourself.

Find your unique joy and carry it with you everywhere you go.