Welcome to Align, Amber!
Align is building customer feedback intelligence for B2B Product teams.
As we near the public launch of our platform, it’s time to also expand our core team. Today, we’re super excited to say hi to Amber Rucker, who joins us as our Head of UX, based in Barcelona. After leading product & design teams at unicorn companies Veriff & Cloudbees, she embarked on her own founding journey with Aikido and has spent the majority of her career making complex B2B products feel seamless to customers.
Earlier this week, we asked her a couple of questions to learn more about her journey and reasons for joining Align:
Tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to the world of product design.
I went to school for design originally so the journey TO design was quite short but it’s been a winding path since then. While I was in school I took on some freelance design work and had a client who had a very different definition of what ‘web design’ meant. Quickly I needed to dive into the world of development, but luckily I absolutely loved it. For the next 6 or so years my resume switches between being a developer (who designs) or a designer (who codes). This is up until research, testing and analytics started to really become something companies were willing to invest in. That subjective aspect of design felt more definitive or measurable and I left the code behind in favor of really dedicating my time to researched, measurable design. I’ve been doing that and leading those functions ever since.
What made you choose to join Align?
As someone who has led research functions for many years, way too much of the job of a researcher is the manual aspect of importing, tagging, organizing, etc all the important information you get your hands on. It is… not great.
Also, there is a problem that plagues almost every company, across all business sizes, where the learnings and insights from one team never seem to make it to other teams that need them. There just hasn’t been a way for sales, support and product to have a place where these come together, without needing 8 meetings and 15 manual spreadsheets to accomplish it.
All that to say that I’ve been looking for Align for so long and who doesn’t love to solve their own problems.
What piece of content has made the biggest impact on you?
Oh man. I honestly couldn’t even narrow this answer down to a reasonably sized list. I read far too many books about cognitive science and quite a number of them have had a huge impact on the way I design products, how I interview users/customers and how I lead a team. Not many of them are meant to be related to those topics but they very much are. I think, in general, it wouldn’t hurt anyone to read a little about how the human mind works. Perhaps one day I’ll make a reading list. 🙂
What’s a bucket list travel destination for you?
I used to travel more or less full time and so I feel like I’ve ticked off most of my bucket list travel destinations and have repeated a few of the greatest hits. Lately I have become more keen on slower travels to quieter places. However, I do really love scuba diving so there are a few places I would love to dive, like Egypt and Norway.
Welcome to the team!
