Melissa Schaff
Summary
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SeniorMelissa Schaff is a design-forward product leader and Chief Innovation Officer with eight years of hands-on UX, content strategy, and product design experience across government and finance. She has led high-impact government initiatives at USDS and DDS—most notably consolidating and relaunching VA.gov to streamline Veterans’ access to benefits—and later translated that user-centered approach to developer-focused products at Goldman Sachs’ Financial Cloud Platform. Melissa founded the UX practice at a strategic communications agency and has roots in user research and front-end design from roles at Esri, Reingold, and Targeted Victory, giving her a rare blend of content, IA, and technical empathy. She pairs classroom experience as a former General Assembly instructor with ongoing study in innovation strategy and accountable AI at top institutions, signaling a commitment to thoughtful, ethical design. Based in Philadelphia, she balances systems-thinking with craft sensibilities—often prototyping solutions informed by ethnographic research and a curator’s eye from her Art History background. Outside work she experiments with culinary projects, museum exploration, and hands-on DIY, which she cites as informal labs for creativity and user observation.
8 years of coding experience
Github Skills (4)
uswds4
accessibility4
clarity4
open-source2
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
melissajschaff/dsvafiles
Sep 2017 - Mar 2018
Contributions:6 pushes, 1 branch in 6 months
department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team
Mar 2020 - Oct 2020
Public resources for building on and in support of VA.gov. Visit complete Knowledge Hub:
Contributions:2 reviews, 160 commits, 13 PRs in 7 months
govvisitknowledge
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