"It’s a great pleasure to recommend Dylan Cooper for the role of UX Designer.

There are two things you should know about Dylan. First, he is an unmatched idea generator: he seeks out feedback in the early, ugly, and uncertain stages of a project and pursues new data on which to build a solid foundation for solutions. Second, his curiosity is infectious. Whenever I planned cross-functional team placements, Dylan was my secret weapon: a cure for what ailed a team stuck in analysis-paralysis.

Because Dylan fails fast, he succeeds often. In his work on my Product team, Dylan redesigned a complicated and thorny navigation system for our flagship product. The product’s existing navigation struggled under the weight of redoubling its functionality each release, and additionally, serviced more than five personas, each with differing levels of system access. Dylan navigated the complexity with curiosity, unafraid of failing even in the face of something as intimidating as global navigation. Dylan’s discovered direction was added to the roadmap in the following quarter.

Dylan’s impact is not limited strictly to the product itself. In Dylan’s most recent placement on a cross-functional team, I did not select based on Dylan’s exceptional breadth of knowledge or thick UI requirements, as I certainly could have. Instead, I placed him alongside a struggling peer: a growing designer who was grappling with feedback skills and confidence issues. Over the development of that cycle, I watched that uncertain designer sketch more confidently, participate more comfortably in critiques, and self-report higher engagement and self-assurance week over week. I directly attribute this to Dylan’s restorative, stabilizing, and empowering impact.

While I have taken a great deal of space in this letter to share what I have personally found most unique in Dylan as a designer and team member, I will take this last moment to confirm I am roundly confident in his skills. He is a clear and expeditious prototyper and Figma expert. He has shown extraordinary proficiency developing an in-flux design system with the team as well as working with established standards. He is effective in both the first diamond and the second, with the skills and the open-mind to validate and test his team’s solutions. He is equally invested in the details of improving a mature product as much as he is in the large unknowns of an immature one.

Should you be looking for someone with these hard skills plus a contagious curiosity, I recommend Dylan highly."