Amanda Poirier
ABOUT
I came to design through business. After earning a bachelor’s in entrepreneurship, I joined a print shop producing work for soft drink brands like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Dr Pepper, where I worked in print production and visual design. Business taught me that design only matters if it works for the people paying for it and the people using it. Print taught me precision: every detail matters when a mistake costs a full press run.
That combination led me to a Master’s in Innovative Design from Wichita State University, where I learned to treat ambiguity as raw material instead of a roadblock.
At Koch, I was part of the AI Innovation and Design team, where I helped build UX foundations across subsidiaries with very different products, teams, and levels of design maturity. My work spanned enterprise platforms, data-dense B2B tools, design systems, and employee experiences.
Today I’m the Experience Design and Activation Lead at Heartspring, a Wichita nonprofit serving children with special needs and their families. As the organization’s first and only experience designer, most of my work is service design: mapping how families and staff move through systems, finding where trust breaks down, and building plans that people can actually adopt.
Different industries, same thread. An engineer choosing between thousands of parts and a parent waiting 18 months for therapy both need the same thing: a clear picture of where they stand and what happens next.
I look for the root cause.
The problem I’m handed is real, but it’s often a symptom of something deeper. I dig in before designing a fix.
I design for adoption.
A great solution nobody uses isn’t a solution, so I bring stakeholders along early.
I make the invisible visible.
Journey maps, blueprints, and workflows turn “it’s complicated” into something a team can act on.
I’m a mom to a 10-year-old who asks better “why” questions than most stakeholders. I’m also a devoted old fashioned critic and a cat person twice over. Every year, my mom and I join the Wichita Eagle Medallion Hunt. We’ve come close more than once, and we’ll join the search as long as they keep putting it on.