Generalist product designer, driven by curiosity and agency. I enjoy building products that make users love their everyday work a little more. Currently learning to design in code.

Viya Q.

Relational

- Co-founder of a design studio supporting purpose-driven entrepreneurs
- Design and ops: client recruitment, onboarding, and product design (group coaching, community structures)
- Handle core business operations: accounting, legal, banking, account management

Partner

- Design, development & launch of new line-of-business for a successful music teaching company
- Designing events and experiences for a fiddle music practice community
- Designing company organizational structure for business partnerships
- Facilitating feedback sessions with community members

Community Strategist - FiddleHed

Acquired

- Coaching and founder support for business sustainability through fundraising and organization design 
- Helped set-up and streamline core banking, accounting, account management operations & system design
- Design of social games and rituals in Discord community space

Advisor & Executive Producer - Lingonberry Intelligence

Ember Consulting

We identified a critical gap in community hiring: businesses struggling to find community managers who actually know how to launch paid communities; and community managers looking for *actual* community jobs, not social media or marketing roles. So we built the solution.
Ember Fractionals is a three-part ecosystem:
✔️ Course & Certification - Teaching specialized 0-1 community skills with a generalist mindset
✔️ Curated Directory - Vetted community managers with experience in early-stage builds, strategy, and operations
✔️ Quality-Guaranteed Placement - Connecting the right talent with the right opportunities

Ember Fractionals - Co-Founder & Partner

The Sensemaking Scenius

I wear multiple hats within the Sensemaking Scenius:
🎩 Founder & Organizational Architect - Pioneered the community using an innovative scenius-org structure, growing from 3 to 65+ active members in social sensemaking
🎩 Community Experience Designer - Created and facilitate bi-weekly community rituals, sensemaking games, and collaborative experiences that build deep relationships and shared purpose among members
🎩Strategic Steward - Lead multiple working groups including mission/vision development, and design emergent organizational structures that enable authentic collaboration and continuous community evolution
🎩Culture Cultivator - Nurture vibrant community engagement through intentional async/sync facilitation, fostering a space of belonging that spans from casual social connections to deep collaborative partnerships

Source, Steward, Community Gardener

Facilitation Pods Commons

The Facilitation Pods Commons is a hub for facilitators across industries to gather and support one another. Our core offering is the Facilitation Pod, an intimate, small-group space to reflect on our experience as facilitators, practice facilitation, and find more ease in our facilitation work.

Facilitator and Steward

Relational Social Tech R&D Lab

- Co-founded a social tech R&D lab to explore innovative social applications for emergent technologies like blockchain & AI
- Convened developers, engineers and designers into small work groups to build software in a playful way
- Designed & tested innovative approaches to building emergent technology

Co-Founder, Social & Org Designer

BIGTIME

- People Lead for a 40+ person theme camp at Burning Man 
- Communications design & curation of content for weekly updates & camp handbooks
- Glue across all aspects of camp: art, architecture/build, finance/budgeting, communal product offerings
- Qualitative survey design & findings analysis (results: https://kpaxle.mmm.page/bigtime)

People Lead

Interhackt

Part of organizational team and participant in a week-long interaction-design hackathon 
- developed Discord community structures and hosted matchmaking events for hackathon participants
- facilitated live events through Discord video/voice chat, and moderated text-based convos in the Discord for 250+ participants
- co-designed a non-linear chat app around branching-style conversations with a software engineer

Strategic Facilitator

Ponder

- Co-founder where I wore a lot of hats: setting strategy, product design, user-testing, quality assurance testing, marketing, internal organizational processes, development of case studies
- Brought people together through social experiences in the app, like a shared journaling
- My first experience building software with a team

Co-Founder/Operations Whiz

Holloway

Support the development of "The Holloway Guide to Remote Work" through:
- research and development of the "Ultimate Remote Work Tools Landscape"
- qualitative interviews with startup founders and leaders about remote work 
- analysis of interview findings, identification of thematic elements, incorporation of findings in the Guide
- editorial support in reviewing drafts of the Guide as it progressed to its final form.

Contributor - Research and Editorial

IBM Watson Health

- Program Design, Researcher Analyst: codifying best practices for health programs to adapt and implement with clients from state and federal government entities 
- Technical Writer: translate quantitative research findings into qualitative language to better describe health system processes and outcomes to a broader audience
- Operator: manage budget and staff time to ensure both financial and people sustainability
- Communications & Org Design: build synchronous and asynchronous communications systems for internal teams on multi-year projects; determine appropriate scheduling and style of snyc comms for teams based on project to ensure work flow, and quality of deliverables

Senior Research Leader

👋 I'm Kristen, I'm a relational designer transforming community-driven businesses into creative, self-sustaining ecosystems.

As a community strategist, I guide founders and entrepreneurs in transitioning their audience & customers into a new role: community members. I create spaces where shared creativity emerges naturally through member contribution and participation.

Previously, I founded an R&D lab for social tech innovation where I built and tested techniques for bringing social/community to the forefront in blockchain and AI development. 

Prior to that, I spent 10+ years as a health policy researcher and consultant with an emphasis on publicly funded home/community-based services. I collaborated with federal and state governments on health program design, strategy and operations. I co-founded a health insurance company (acquired) where I also worked as a leader in a clinical operations role.

Fun facts: I studied human evolution in undergrad. I’ve coached girl’s lacrosse teams from kindergarten to college. I co-founded a mentorship program that is still running 10+ years later.

taplio

The Battle

Viya Q.

Kristen Pavle

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