Mary Formanek

As a Staff UX Product designer and Experience Lead, Mary has experience creating UX solutions for most up-and-coming tech. She has successfully led teams through complex high-risk space craft dashboards for Space Force. She championed the new UX initiative at NGA. While at Salesforce, Mary's work impressed so many that she was hand-picked by Salesforce's CEO, Marc Benioff, to work on a new product of his design. During her tenure at Discount Tire, she spearheaded the creation, testing, and implementation of groundbreaking technologies, including a revolutionary tread depth reader and an innovative AR tire picker. Additionally, she provided leadership to product design teams, overseeing projects such as Google Home apps, Zebra mobile devices, and in-store kiosks. She has designed multiple fantasy sports apps for game analytics and much more.

She has had the privilege of traveling nationwide for multiple teams to conduct 200+ hours of user interviews, evaluations, and testing. She has also conducted 80+ hours of worldwide interviews, research synthesis, and design recommendations for Salesforce.

Mary has experience working in B2B, B2C, SaaS, enterprise, in-house product design, Omni-Channel, Cross Channel, start-ups, global corporations, and both waterfall and Agile environments.

"My job is to understand human psychology and behaviors and analyze human data, to design a system that is easy to use while keeping in mind the technical restraints of the product to achieve business goals."

Throughout her professional journey, she consistently offered leadership throughout every phase of each project, including the periods between assignments. She established and maintained the highest quality of execution across all her designs, paved the way for seamless cross-team collaboration, provided a strong point of view, built strong partnerships with her teams, and fostered collaboration with her customers.

Mary is very involved with the UX community outside of her full-time role. She is often found writing UX articles, making UX TikToks, mentoring, and continuing her education. Mary currently holds a Master's Certification, all five specialty certifications from NNg. She has a wide variety of other certifications in AR, VR, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, and AI. Mary also served as the Lead Director of the UXPA Arizona.