Madeleine Smith

Hi, I'm Maddie!

Every data system, governance structure, and software service has something that isn't working for the people who rely on it. I love figuring out what and building what's missing.

I've been doing that at nonprofits for almost eight years, building relationships with everyone from the people using the tools to the funders paying for them. I'm ready to do it in tech. For me, it's always been about understanding people, evaluating what's working, and making it better.

I live in San Francisco with my husband Chris and two cats. I think about the environment a lot. I also read constantly, write poems and songs, and improvise whenever I can — on stage and on the dance floor.

Madeleine Smith

Projects

California Nature Dashboard — a map of California with rivers and reservoirs marked.

California Nature Dashboard

A living survey of California's ecosystems — tides, rivers, reservoirs, monarch migration, pollinators, and birds. Real-time data from NOAA, USGS, eBird, and iNaturalist.

Past work

  1. Customer success management

    When the Product Was the Problem

    Designing a tiered engagement model for a 15-partner network with no margin for churn.

  2. UX research

    Designing for Restoration Not Extraction

    A formative qualitative study with seven program sites, conducted before the system that would serve them was designed.

  3. Evaluation infrastructure

    From Paper to Pipeline

    Architecting a FERPA-compliant SaaS pipeline for a 150-person youth-serving nonprofit with no centralized data infrastructure.

  4. Coming soon

    Rigor as an Equity Practice

    Qualitative analysis of poverty alleviation non-profits: first cross-program client survey.

Writing

  1. Coming soon

    AI isn't conscious. You're just lonely.

    An eco-feminist perspective on the narrative that AI has consciousness.