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Chelsea Otakan
Design Systems at Stripe
Chelsea Otakan is a versatile professional with a background in product design and front-end development. She has a passion for design systems, coding, economics, red pandas, karaoke, and learning.
With extensive experience in designing for various sectors including developers, open source, social change, finance, and karaoke, Chelsea has honed her skills in creating consumer and developer-focused products.
Her expertise extends to building and architecting design systems, interviewing and hiring design teams, and directing cross-functional product teams.
Chelsea Otakan's goal is to contribute to the development of beautiful, scalable, and user-friendly design systems for intricate products. Her specialties include user interface design, prototyping, user experience, design management, CSS, and styleguide development.
She pursued Front-end Development at Bloc, participated in the DesignerFund Bridge Fellow program, and holds a BA in Journalism and Digital Media from the University of Nevada-Reno.
Throughout her career, Chelsea has held roles at reputable organizations including Stripe where she worked as a Product Designer and Product Design Manager.
She also contributed her expertise as a Design Program Mentor at Thinkful, Senior Designer / UI Developer at Sourcegraph, Design Director at Vouch, Product Designer at Change.org, UX Designer and Product Lead at TaskRabbit, Designer at Automattic, UI Group Contributor at WordPress, and in various other design and creative roles.
Her professional journey includes experiences in graphic design, web editing, and mentoring, showcasing a well-rounded skill set and a deep understanding of design principles across different industries.
Highlights
In a few weeks, I’ll be closing out over two years at Lattice to take a long sabbatical. I’ll be taking the time to focus on all the things that work (even the most “balanced” jobs) takes time and energy away from: my family, music, and my mental and physical health. After that, I’ll be exploring more flexible ways of working than in-house/full time work. If you have experience consulting in product design, design leadership, and/or design systems, please reach out! I’d love to pick your brain.
It’s been a wild few years watching this team and company grow through some of the hardest times in tech. I’ve gotten to work with some amazing people and learned so much about how to build both culture and craft in a sustainable way.
As a former manager-turned-IC, this particular set of design leaders was very hard to walk away from. Cap Watkins and Jared Erondu are the real deal and I would jump at the chance to work with them again. Their particular balance of transparency, high standards, and deep understanding of the individuals on their teams made me a better designer and leader.
Rings very true.
