"Tessa is different from many leaders you encounter in corporate life. She is relentlessly kind, honest, cares about people as much as the work and has a very high bar for quality, not just in the work, but in the culture she creates around her. That is rare in many organizations because kindness, authenticity, and the gentle confidence of her leadership style require resilience, toughness, fortitude and self-awareness many senior leaders simply lack. That was especially noteworthy working on the projects within her scope, which were crucially important, highly political, and multi-lateral in their complexity. Despite those facts, she maintained a talented, engaged team with high-quality standards and drove impact on projects that appeared doomed at the outset.

I would not hesitate to hire or work with (or for) Tessa if the opportunity presented itself. As a designer, teammate, and leader, Tessa Fish is the real deal. "

"I had the privilege to work under Tessa for over a year at Pearson, where she was among my strongest advocates and mentors. Despite not being directly experienced in my field (content strategy) she went out of her way to learn about my work and how it applies to the team so she could better support my collaboration with other team members.

Tessa brings kindness, empathy and a clear vision to every interaction. She's the definition of a servant leader and a joy to report to. I hope I'll get a chance to work with her again in the future."

"As one of Tessa's direct reports, I was able to learn so much from her about developing a high level of craft, holistic systems thinking, and the real impact of design on business outcomes that I will take with me throughout my career. She ensures that design has a voice, vision, and strategy within an organization and advocates for everyone on her team to succeed. I have been consistently impressed by Tessa's ability to further design's role in a company, collaborate with executives and stakeholders across departments, and push herself to tackle new skills and challenges."

"Tessa was my director at Pearson. She prioritized the work for myself and the team. Even during a complex project, Tessa guided me into the right direction with her leadership. And she also remained focused on everyone’s individual needs. She was a very supportive and collaborative leader."

"Tessa's elegant and device agnostic solutions made the Scribd product not only much more intuitive but also very clean and delightful. Her extreme attention to detail shows through and through from ideation to the delivery of detailed and pixel perfect specifications. She sells her well thought out designs with conviction. She is adored and respected by engineers, supervisors and other designers alike. She takes special interest in mentoring fellow designers to help them succeed."

"Tessa recruited me to work for her London UX Research team. Besides having processes and templates (for briefs, requests, proposals, retros, etc) up and running, she was keen to improve UX Research by learning from my past experiences, tools I recommended and different technologies. Despite being based in cities with an 8 hour time difference, she always went the extra mile to have really early meetings to accommodate my working hours. She's a dedicated manager, open to hear and ready to improve things."

"Tessa is a great asset to any UX team. She helped to create a more collaborative environment between the Product and UX teams, and helped to incorporate user research into our product process. Her skills in UX design and research were incredibly valuable and contributed to over a 20% reduction in support calls during our time working together. I would highly recommend Tessa for any UX position."

"Tessa manages expectations well, is a good communicator, and keeps everyone on target. She makes sure things don't slip through the cracks but also that they don't become scope creep. She's very easy to get along with I've enjoyed working with her at multiple companies. "

"Tessa is a true expert in improving a product's user experience leveraging a design thinking approach. One of her many key contributions at Vonage was creating a superior experience for our customers that are using our industry leading Video API including understanding key personas and use cases."

"Tessa was my mentor at Pearson through a formal mentorship program, and she was helpful to get guidance from. She is especially strong at listening, and she took things I brought up seriously. When we started, I expressed interest in growing without changing the things I liked about myself, and she was receptive to that. I really appreciated that she took my ask seriously, and that the resources she recommended over our mentorship took that into consideration."

"The quality and results of the research projects enabled our products team to call the right priorities, implement impactful design changes, and move products in the right direction." 

"Tessa is a methodical and savvy user experience leader. She architected unbiased and highly informative research to inform our website navigation. She continued to advise over the course of the entire project, even while juggling a separate more than full time project load, ensuring sanctity of the research results were preserved and the best design conventions and practices were employed."

"I met Tessa when she was Director of Product Design after Vonage’s acquisition of Tokbox. She did a fantastic job walking my team through all of the great UX persona and customer journey research she had completed to date, including the methodology and reasoning. That work heavily influenced our Demand Generation GTM creative and tactics. Post acquisition, Tessa was responsible for our full suite of applications and APIs. She also played a key role in the Vonage website redesign and Brand redesign. Her efforts to build relationships across teams was noticeable. She was receptive to feedback and looked for ways to expand her team's research to make insights more valuable for the entire marketing team. I highly recommend Tessa and enjoyed working with her! "

"I have worked closely with Tessa and her design team on several projects during my time as a sales leader at Tokbox. Tessa has been a great partner and asset to the sales organization as we collaborated on advertising campaigns, website strategy and user feedback on product designs. She is data-driven in her strategy making sure UX research plays an important role in the product and design process. She has always been a great listener, open communicator, and honest about what is possible to deliver and when. As a co-worker, she is an absolute delight to be around and always brings a positive energy to the room. I have truly enjoyed working with Tessa and would recommend her to any team looking for a strong design leader." 

"As my design counterpart on a number of key features, Tessa was a pleasure to work with bringing to the table a customer-centric approach, debating and challenging ideas as necessary to help improve the final outcome and most importantly never losing focus of the bigger picture. Her strengths include meticulous project planning and management, extensive user research to assist with data-driven decisions and championing design thinking across the organization."

"Tessa was integral to the Vonage rebrand. Her design insight, ability to help refine and take design to the next level was one of the main reasons the rebrand was so successful. A real team player and importantly passionate about delivering excellent work." 

"Tessa was integral in facilitating an open dialogue between the Product and Design teams. She included me, and other PMs, in a customer journey research workshop that led to a unified understanding of our customers' journeys and allowed us to make more informed product strategy decisions. Although working with globally dispersed teams across timezones is always a challenge, Tessa was able to effectively manage relationships between these distributed teams. I am grateful for the opportunity to both work with and learn from Tessa and very much hope to work with her again in the future!"

"Tessa is a fantastic leader, and it shows by how well the TokBox design team runs and how great the culture is. She is able to understand what her team members need, and helps clear the way to make sure they can accomplish it. Even with remote designers, and the addition of contractors, the team was cohesive and really gelled. I learned a lot from how she worked with her team."

"I was fortunate enough to meet Tessa when she was seeking keynote speakers to support her efforts to evangelize UX best practices at Vonage. I later had the pleasure of working with her as a client. Tessa not only approaches research and product development strategically and from a user / customer perspective -- a must -- but she’s also a great leader and team builder. A real ‘lean-in’, roll up her sleeves, lead-by-example practitioner; always providing clear direction and clear briefs to agency teams. Tessa's not afraid to change things up and always brings fresh thinking to the research and product development process. I continue to admire her passion for doing great, innovative work."

"My team worked with Tessa for the TED world theater project. As a design lead, Tessa was a good listener and had a good appreciation of the engineering imperatives. She did a great job of accommodating and translating it into a UI that also had to conform to the guidelines of a major brand. Projects need resources like her when working with complex UX design initiatives."