A. Rheannon Spaulding
Creating Alignment with Visuals
Strategic leadership requires translating complexity into shared understanding.
The hardest part of cross-functional work isn’t the actual work – it’s ensuring everyone understands what we’re building and why.
She creates visual frameworks that serve as shared references across Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Executive teams. These diagrams have been used in board presentations, training materials, and strategic planning sessions. They’re conversation tools that transform abstract concepts into actionable understanding –
a Single Source of Truth (SSoT).
What needs to get done, needs to get done.
Humor = included
She encourages while setting a, “Let’s get it done” attitude, asking for a low-ego, problem-solving focused environment.
When everyone is focused on bringing their perspectives and expertise to solving problems, a great deal can be accomplished.
Bringing in laughter is… just something Rheannon brings along with her.
Leadership Style
She understands when to break projects into groups, to get projects kicked off, and to empower others to lead, while providing supportive processes, strategies, and decision making as-needed.
As a child, she vowed that if she ever became a leader, to always be the type of leader to give a helping hand.
In the 80s and 90s, she was raised in a military and manufacturing plant household and she has been exposed to leaders who were always there when it was, “All hands on deck” to ensure project success.
Those leaders didn’t shy away from joining their crew, getting dirty, and putting in a good day’s work, and neither does she.
When you work with her, morning check-ins are often a time to enjoy a hot beverage, a good laugh, and a sense of momentum for the day’s work ahead.
CREATOR + ARCHITECT OF 3 AI / ML CORPORATE SYSTEMS
An interesting thing to know is Rheannon has created the architecture for machine learning platforms on several occasions.
The first was a keyword-based self-hierarching system for a B2B2C organization in 2012, based on first principles. Based on customer purchases, this system was designed to create tiered connections which provided speedier search results, suggestions for future purchases, and for the distribution centers, the ability to predict stocking needs based on common purchase-pairings.
The second would come many years later. It is unclear whether the architecture was used by Dow Jones, however, the architecture was proposed and pitched across the organization. Many conversations with data scientists and LLM experts transpired as well. A pilot project was launched for a small subset of customers – then she was part of a round of layoffs.
Her focus, at the organization level, was to educate about implicit and explicit inputs, and how those can be utilized in varying ways – providing a strategic initiative to be adopted across all consumer news organizations in the
Dow Jones family.
The third was in 2023. As part of an effort to bridge educational content and entertainment with social media, the aim was to create 2 divergent forms of AI. One, which was an active moderator for communication. The other was personalization of social media content with a transparent user-controllable setting. The prototype and project plan were built and submitted for grant approval in late 2024.
OTHER EXPERIENCES
Aside from creating architecture for AI and working on teams to implement adjustments, Rheannon has been involved with teams who built AI including her time working at Amazon, learning a wealth of knowledge on the Diveplane team who create a unique Explainable/Editable ML platform, as well as reviewing foundational docs by the creator of Uplift Norn AI.
USE
Rheannon is commonly utilizing AI and encourages her teams to utilize it in smart ways, while ensuring much of their work still remains their own creation. She has also begun to dabble in vibe coding.
Artificial Intelligence
Design Systems
Rheannon has been building component-based design systems since before the industry standardized around the practice. Why? Because the benefits are undeniable: reduced design and engineering costs, faster delivery, and – most importantly – users who don’t waste cognitive energy relearning an interface with every interaction. When patterns are consistent, users build mental models once and apply them everywhere. That’s efficiency at scale. Design systems aren’t trendy methodology; they’re fundamental to how modern organizations should operate.
Testimonials
WHAT COLLEAGUES SAY ABOUT WORKING WITH RHEANNON
"I had the absolute privilege of reporting directly to Rheannon... what stood out most to me was her ability to motivate and bring out the best in everyone around her. She has a rare gift for combining empathy with execution—always considering others while driving projects forward with precision and care..."
Jennifer Stephenson
Research & Exec. Assistant - Revelnation
"...she has an exceptional ability to bring creative screen designs and intuitive user flows to life, balancing innovation with practicality.
What impressed me most was not only her design vision, but also her leadership—she created an environment where ideas flowed freely, and every team member felt engaged and valued..."
What impressed me most was not only her design vision, but also her leadership—she created an environment where ideas flowed freely, and every team member felt engaged and valued..."
Gary Cudak
President of Revelnation and Chief OS Architect & Technical Lead at Lenovo
"I had the pleasure of working with Rhea on Market Data initiatives at Dow Jones. Rhe is an out-of-the-box thinker who is able to balance the minutiae within the design with the big picture; a true innovator! Rhe never loses sight of the forest for the tree..."
Amy Hoffman
Former Director of Product Management, Market Experience - Dow Jones
"I worked with Rheannon on a number of different projects over the past three years at Lenovo. Her insights and intellectual curiosity served us well in customer feedback workshops, user research initiatives, and new feature designs.
Rhe is a very skilled designer, technically proficient, and her approach is always human-centered and customer-focused. She brought several new concepts into our products that went beyond just improving usability and truly enhanced the customer journey end-to-end..."
Rhe is a very skilled designer, technically proficient, and her approach is always human-centered and customer-focused. She brought several new concepts into our products that went beyond just improving usability and truly enhanced the customer journey end-to-end..."
Dan Verwolf
Director of Product Management for Cloud & Software Solutions - Lenovo
"Her customer-centric approach puts the end users in mind that enables her to deliver desirable solutions for our customers. She can balance sensibility and methods to match people’s needs and deliver a product that is technically feasible, meets business needs and creates marketing opportunities...
...expectations when she first stepped in was to own design thinking, create mockups and deliver the redlines for the end-to-end UX. However, she did not hesitate to fill in the gaps and play a Web Dev role just to make sure that we remain on track..."
...expectations when she first stepped in was to own design thinking, create mockups and deliver the redlines for the end-to-end UX. However, she did not hesitate to fill in the gaps and play a Web Dev role just to make sure that we remain on track..."
Mark Tan
Former Sr. Product Manager, Recommerce - Amazon
Full-versions can be read underneath, “Recommendations” section on LinkedIn
IxD, IA, and UI Design
Strategic thinking doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it’s built on years of hands-on design work, including making and learning from mistakes. This section features Rheannon’s information architecture and UI design work: sitemaps that organized complex ecosystems, wireframes that defined user flows, and interface designs that served millions of users across companies like Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft, and Lenovo. The ability to lead design organizations comes from understanding what it actually takes to design and ship great products.
This is that foundation.
– A. Rheannon Spaulding –
Product Design and Research Leader with a technical and design background.
An Information Architect
20+ yrs in the making.
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