Hi, I’m Jody Thomas. I’m currently a Senior Director of Design at Northwestern Mutual where I lead the Platform, Design System & Accessibility teams. I’m also a co-organizer of NoVA UX, a Washington, DC area meetup with over 5,000 members.

Previously I was a Senior Director of Product Design at PowerSchool, where I led the Design System and Cross Portfolio Initiatives. My previous company, Schoology, was acquired by PowerSchool in 2019. At Schoology I led a team of distributed designers working on building experiences for K-12 students, teachers and parents.

Before joining PowerSchool/Schoology I led teams at Capital One, focused on digital transformation efforts in the Consumer Banking space and scaling the design team/maturing the design practice. Prior to that I spent several years at a startup, StockUp, where I led both design and product including managing an offshore development team in Ukraine.

During my time at EightShapes, I led the Visual Design practice and worked with clients including Cisco, Marriott, and NCARB focusing on building early design systems. I collectively spent a decade with AOL and designed its homepage in multiple languages and countries during the height of its popularity. Earlier in my career, I was a designer for Discovery Channel, collaborating with producers, programmers, and show liaisons to bring television content to the web, when internet video was at its infancy. I earned my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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