Deanna Rizzi

I’m a UX Design & Research leader with 10+ years of experience building customer-centered products, teams, and practices across complex digital ecosystems serving 120M+ monthly users.

I believe great design leadership is about creating clarity—clarity for people navigating complex experiences and clarity for teams trying to solve the right problems. Research has been foundational to my career and continues to shape how I lead: stay curious, challenge assumptions, understand the problem before designing the solution, and make sure the customer has a meaningful voice in the decisions that affect them.

Throughout my career, I’ve led multidisciplinary Design, UX Research, and Content Design teams; launched and scaled 0→1 products; evolved design systems; and built operating models, research practices, and workflows that help teams move faster without sacrificing care or craft. At Healthline, I created a new creative operating model that increased organizational efficiency by 85%, while leading experience strategy across a consumer platform reaching more than 120M people each month.

I’m at my best in organizations navigating growth, complexity, or change. I enjoy bringing structure to ambiguity, developing talented people, connecting research and design more closely to product strategy, and building the systems that allow great work to scale.

I stay close enough to the work to understand the realities my teams face while keeping sight of the larger business and customer context. My goal is to create environments where teams can do meaningful work—and where design and research become strategic drivers of trust, growth, and lasting impact.