My entire career has focused on curating branded, immersive experiences to drive product adoption.
I went to the Columbus College of Art & Design. My professional experience started at Bath & Body Works helping shape and create a billion dollar toiletry brand by orchestrating delightful product experiences, and continued with the state of Ohio as part of a creative team rebranding the entire state, from websites to tourism.
Then I went to a fintech for about seven years, working on person-to-person payments. I focused on positioning messaging around risk and security to inspire people to move money in and out of their mobile devices.
My journey at McKinsey so far
Four years ago, I was hired as a consultant to help the firm think about how to change the cyber behaviors of 30,000+ colleagues. About three months into the project, the chief digital officer and leadership within Technology and Digital (T&D) asked me to join full time to support new technology adoption. We were about to launch Slack, Zoom, and other tools that would allow us to move faster and operate more co-creatively and collaboratively.
Fast forward to today: I have an entire product adoption practice and am focused on creating behavior-change programs using design methodologies to drive desirable outcomes. My projects include planning how to create a one-firm cybersecurity experience to charting how we curate empathy maps and create journeys that enable users to experience our values.
Part of my work is about building awareness around risky cyber behavior. Our security product teams figure out how to create a product that has security embedded in it from the moment we are creating the code, all the way to sunsetting the product. I work with these engineers who handle the tech, but I am a human engineer, so to speak. I handle the user’s emotional experience.
On what it means to be out at McKinsey
Twenty years ago, I left a heterosexual marriage, came out as a lesbian, and became a single mother of two. While I’m now in a fabulous, loving relationship with three children between the two of us, getting to this place required allyship and people showing up for me. I pledged back then to create an inclusive experience for others because I know what it’s like to hide my true self.
McKinsey is enabling me to fulfill my mission of being an ally. I am a member of Equal at McKinsey, McKinsey’s worldwide network of LGBTQ+ colleagues, whom I often turn to for support. Additionally, I support our firm-wide Diversity, Equity and Inclusion leadership team and lead our allyship efforts for all T&D. In 2021, I represented McKinsey at the Lesbians Who Tech & Allies Debug Summit. I got to speak with hundreds of attendees about leading with love.
I ran McKinsey’s global Day of Pink, which is about standing up to bullying and giving a voice to the LGBTQ+ community. We orchestrated an entire month of allyship programming. One week, we sat down with senior leadership to have those difficult, but important, conversations about what it means to be an ally.
McKinsey has received a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality index and been named one of its top 100 places to work for LGBTQ+ talent for 17 years in a row. We are proud of that. I feel the firm’s commitment to me personally, but the firm also empowers me to be a true ally, speak up, and lift others up.
Bringing the Atlanta T&D hub to life
While we already have a large team in Atlanta, we are building a brand new innovation and tech hub. We’re going to bring 600 technologists from across the firm and within the local community to develop technology products that support firm colleagues.
We want these technologists to have an awesome place to work, so I am tapping my expertise around human behavior and brand experience to build a physical place where innovation can happen. We’re asking questions like, how do we want it to look and smell, and how do we want people to feel when they walk into the space?
I’m excited to be here in Atlanta. My partner and I have a home here, and we travel back and forth between Atlanta and Boston. I love everything about Atlanta. I love that we live in a super cultural city, where we have unbelievable talent, unbelievable food, and so much diversity.
More about Mary
Mary is an artist and avid painter, and she loves to travel all over the world. Her family is from Macedonia, so she travels home and to northern Greece and northern Macedonia as often as she can. She and her partner are passionate about exploring foreign places and finding new adventures.