When I went to work at Regions, I actually had two job offers. One was on their engineering team. At my previous job, I was a web developer for an ad agency (Luckie) primarily coding pharmaceutical sites for Glaxo Smith Kline. A recruiter had helped line up the position with Regions, and Luckie was the agency of record for Regions. The two companies occasionally poached talent from one another within reason. I learned about the open position for UX Designer and applied for it as well. My recruiter was gracious enough to tell me to take whichever position I found most attractive—even if he wouldn't get credit for it. I had been a developer for so long, I really wanted the opportunity grow my design skills. And the team was incredibly open and inclusive.

At Regions I had the chance to really hone my design skills. These were my salad years. Up until that point I had established a lot of range, and that included good branding and general design chops. But I hadn't yet deeply tested my product design abilities. I was exposed to an organization where UX was an actual department within the company, and had close to 50 people. And those people were focused on particular roles within user experience like UX research, UX content, UX engineering, UX accessibility and of course UX design. Even with those distinct roles, I often would spill over and assume somewhat multi-disciplinary functions like copywriting and accessibility. I learned what it meant to work at a Fortune 500 and in a SAFe Agile business. And my coding skills still helped as we started to explore our own design system. At one point I had close to 10% of the code in our react front-end attributed to me as well. If I had to sum up my experience at Regions in one word, it would be exposure.