Nice to meet you. ✨

The Experience Standard is passionate about crafting exceptional digital product strategies through human-centered design, harnessing the power of innovative thinking to elevate business growth.

About Diane Cronenwett, Principal @ The Experience Standard

I've been a Designer and Product Strategist at Fortune 500 tech companies for 20 years, including Meta, Amazon, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. I design, ship products, run projects, and teach design.

I've product managed consumer products, shaped product strategies and roadmaps, produced visionary design work, and shipped products to millions (and billions) of users with substantial results.

Key Accomplishments:

It's easy to say you've worked at top companies. What truly matters are the results you've delivered and the challenges you've overcome. Here's just a few accomplishments that demonstrate the experience that I draw from to teach courses and workshops:

• Transformed Meta Wi-Fi app. ⬆️ Increased daily active users from 700,000k to 26 million, exceeding expectations.

• Led the redesign of the Meta Pay button, ⬆️ increasing Shopify checkout by 6% and 2% for Facebook checkout, resulting in substantial revenue increases.

• Project managed, and defined a 16-month product roadmap for Wi-Fi projects and led engineering team to craft a new backend, dashboards and metrics collection to inform product strategy.

• Drove the creation of a product vision for the LinkedIn Ads platform and discovery sprint with two senior designers.

I specialize in blending data and qualitative insights and business strategy to conceptualize design and product growth.

I also license courses to LinkedIn Learning, and you can see some of my course titles here: UX Design Courses

My journey from SoCal to here.

I get a lot of questions about how I got my start in this field, and how my career shaped out here's a bit of that story.

I was born and raised in a beach town in Southern California girl. Growing up in Southern California gave me a lot of hustle and grit. Culturally, everyone is busy doing things and chasing their dreams. It's like NYC with palm trees, fostering a drive that definitely shaped who I am and how I relate to the world.

I studied Psychology, but didn't get into the Psychology grad school I wanted to go to. This was a major setback for me. I took a year to figure out what was next.

In that year, I decided that I wanted to be a librarian. Here, I discovered user experience. Organizing information was my gateway to discovering design. It all came together for me when I took an information architecture, and a web design course.

Not getting into the Psychology grad school, which felt like a huge setback, actually turned out to be a good thing. I would have never discovered this new career that I'm so much better suited for. Sometimes things work out that way.

After I realized what I wanted to do (be a UX designer), I created a portfolio and applied to many jobs with no call backs. Then, I decided I had to do more. You can read how I got my first UX job on a recent LinkedIn post below. This is a true story, and in this economy, this is still how things work. It's often referral and word of mouth that gets people hired (and a good UX portfolio)

As I grew in my design career, my product mind eventually became a distinct approach to how I thought about experience. I think of myself as a product manager that designs. Soft skills and business acumen are highly underrated in the design profession, but it was my secret weapon to get things done effectively and with high quality.

The skills that helped me be successful are what I teach and I'd like to help others gain as they find their way around user experience.

🐕 When not thinking about products, data, or design, I'm hanging out with my mini-schnauzer and finding new parks for him to roam.

About The Experience Standard

The Experience Standard elevates product experiences by empowering individuals and teams with user experience and design thinking approaches. Enabling delivery of superior products that delight users and drive business success.

I created The Experience Standard to address a challenge: finding reliable, high-quality guidance for user experience

Entering the field, there wasn't a lot of information on how to improve. I wanted to help fill that void teaching others what I was learning. Over time as the field exploded there's a lot of information which led to new challenges, like how to improve and who to trust for design guidance.

The Experience Standard provides actionable, expert-led guidance to bridge this gap.

I've worked at top tier companies and I'm sharing the knowledge I've learned with anyone who wants to learn. I have a high bar for excellence and my courses reflect that.

Core Beliefs

Design is everything.

Everything is designed, whether its intentional or not. At The Experience Standard, we'd rather it be intentional, so we provide the knowledge you need to create usable, functional, and elegant design.

Design is beyond the User Interface (UI).

It's easier to understand design as just a User Interface (UI), but good design goes beyond interfaces to shape businesses, and product strategies. The goal of the UI is to support the user's goals and business problem.

People problems are business problems.

Design is not a User Interface on top of a business problem. Understanding people, their pain points, and goals in combination with data is a winning formula for solving tough business problems.

Design is for everyone.

Designers have a focused full-time job doing design. But, design methods, and practical applications of design can be done by anyone willing to learn. Like any other set of skills, practice will improve your skills.

If you are in an adjacent design profession: Product Managers, Data Scientists, Business Analysts, Marketers, Engineers, User Researchers, Analysts, Startup founders, or Software Engineer, you will find information to help you gain confidence learning and executing design thinking practices and user interfaces.

If you are in a design profession: User Experience Designer, Service Designer, Content Designer, Product Designer, you'll find practical design advice in addition to career advice leveraging my experience working in corporate environments to thrive.

How The Experience Standard can help you

The Experience Standard provides educational material and content to help you navigate the world of product design, user experience, product management, and product strategy.

Whether you're a designer, a product manager, entrepreneur, marketer, or engineer building out your products, we'll provide advice, articles, courses, insights, and case studies to broaden your knowledge.

Featured in: Media mentions & quotes

“My advice to anyone in the field is to learn how to align others,” Cronenwett says. “The job is more than design, it’s about consensus building and aligning a team of people around a design. Great designers know how to wrangle a group of people around a vision to execute.” (Forage Blog)

Public speaking events

Diane will occasionally engage in public speaking events with topics focused on design careers, product development, and design.

Here's a few:

2023- Visual Analytics Workshop (Beltone, Egypt) Audience: HR, Marketing, Finance, IT, Product Management

2022- Talk UX (Tokyo) - Driving Product Strategy

2015: Academy of Art (San Francisco) "Portfolio development" (Visual development students)