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Women's History Month
In Conversation with
MELISSA LEIDE
A Techronicler interview with Melissa Leide, Head of Experience Design, Caylent
Welcome to our Women’s History Month edition of Techronicler. Today, our guest is Melissa Leide, the Head of Experience Design at Caylent. Melissa’s journey into tech is a refreshing departure from the traditional corporate ladder. Her path began with late nights tinkering with MySpace HTML, navigated through dropping out of college and returning later, and ultimately led her to the forefront of enterprise UX.
As an openly neurodivergent leader who is autistic and has ADHD, Melissa brings a vital perspective to the tech industry. She champions psychological safety, advocates for interdisciplinary paths into engineering, and argues that directness—when paired with context—is a powerful tool for alignment. In this interview, she dismantles the assumption that every AI product needs to be a chatbot and shares her brilliant concept for a productivity tool that tracks “mental loop status” instead of just tasks.
Techronicler: Thank you for joining us, Melissa! Everyone has an origin story! What was the first piece of technology you ever broke, built, or fell in love with?
Melissa Leide:
My origin story is very much MySpace.
When I was younger, I became obsessed with customizing my page. I would stay up late tinkering with HTML and CSS—changing layouts, colors, and how people experienced my profile. At the time, it felt like creative self-expression, but looking back, it was really my first exposure to designing digital experiences.
What fascinated me was realizing that a few lines of code could completely change how someone interacted with something online—and ultimately how they experienced you.
Those late nights experimenting with HTML and CSS are what sparked my love for digital experiences and eventually led me into web design, UX, and product design.
Techronicler: A lot of careers look like straight lines on LinkedIn. How was yours different?
Melissa Leide:
My path into tech wasn’t a straight line.
I dropped out of college after my freshman year because I simply wasn’t ready for that kind of transition in my life. Years later, I returned, finished my associate’s degree, and graduated at 27. Not long after, I landed a role at a web design agency that would shape the trajectory of my career. What started as a design role quickly grew into leadership, and I’ve been managing or directing teams in some capacity ever since.
I remember a professor once telling me that a bachelor’s degree helps open doors along your career path. Without it, he said, success is still possible—but you may have to open more of those doors yourself.
He wasn’t wrong. For a long time, I wrestled with self-doubt about not having that traditional credential. Over time, though, I learned that experience, curiosity, and leadership matter just as much.
Today, leading Experience Design at Caylent, I’m valued for the perspective and impact I bring—not the degree I do or don’t have. I hope other women reading this know that career paths don’t have to be linear or traditional to lead somewhere meaningful.
Techronicler: What is the one problem or project that is taking up 80% of your brain space this month?
Melissa Leide:
Right now, it’s AI adoption.
Most companies are racing to build AI features, but the real challenge isn’t the model—it’s the experience around it. If users don’t trust the output, don’t understand what the system is doing, or feel like the tool is replacing their expertise rather than augmenting it, adoption collapses.
A lot of my work today focuses on helping teams design how AI actually fits into real workflows. That means thinking about transparency, user control, and where AI should assist versus automate.
The technology itself is moving incredibly fast. The bigger challenge is designing systems that people feel confident using in their everyday work.
Techronicler: Are women in leadership still penalized for being too direct?
Melissa Leide:
This question resonates with me in a slightly different way because I’m neurodivergent—I’m autistic and have ADHD.
Directness has always been part of how my brain works, but early in my career, it was often framed as something I needed to fix. I was told to soften my communication or present ideas in ways that felt more comfortable for others.
What I eventually realized is that directness wasn’t the problem—the environment was.
In spaces that truly support different ways of thinking, direct communication becomes an asset. At Caylent, I’ve been fortunate to work with leaders who recognize that.
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from my director, Anjanette Houser, is that directness is most effective when it’s paired with context and what she calls “factual force.” When you combine clarity with explanation and evidence, it becomes a tool for alignment rather than friction.
That shift—from masking how I communicate to using it intentionally—has been incredibly empowering.
Techronicler: If you were given $10M to start a company outside your current field, what problem would you solve?
Melissa Leide:
I’d build tools that help neurodivergent people manage cognitive load in everyday life.
After buying a home, my to-do list exploded, and I found myself overwhelmed—not by the tasks themselves, but by the mental loops they created. So I built a system to track tasks in a way that actually reflected how my brain works.
In addition to the typical task information, I tracked something I call mental loop status—whether a task is actively occupying space in my mind or just sitting on a list. Those “active loop” tasks create a surprising amount of stress, even when they’re small things.
I also tracked energy requirements, sensory load, and the level of executive effort needed to complete a task.
When paired with AI, the system could recommend what to tackle based on my available time and energy that day—prioritizing tasks that were mentally weighing on me while reducing the decision fatigue that often comes with long to-do lists.
Traditional productivity tools assume everyone manages tasks the same way. I’d want to build something that adapts to how different brains actually work.
Techronicler: From your seat, how do you see the rise of AI tools changing the trajectory for women entering engineering today?
Melissa Leide:
AI tools are lowering the barrier to entry for technical work in general. People can experiment, prototype, and build ideas much faster than before.
That shift benefits everyone—but it could be particularly meaningful for women who didn’t follow a traditional computer science path or who entered tech through adjacent disciplines like design, research, or product.
The opportunity AI creates is that the path into building technology is becoming more interdisciplinary. Skills like systems thinking, communication, and understanding human behavior are becoming just as valuable as traditional engineering depth.
What excites me is the possibility that we’ll see more women shaping how technology is designed and used—not just how it’s engineered.
Because ultimately, the technology is rarely the hardest part of AI. The hardest part is designing an experience people actually trust.
Techronicler: What role does UX play in the future of AI?
Melissa Leide:
AI will change how we build software, but UX will determine how people live with it.
The industry often focuses on the intelligence of the model, but the real challenge is designing the interaction between humans and AI. When should AI assist versus automate? How transparent should it be about its reasoning? How do we ensure people feel empowered rather than replaced?
These are not purely technical questions—they’re design questions.
UX will increasingly shape the collaboration layer between humans and intelligent systems. And that work will determine whether AI becomes a tool that genuinely augments human decision-making or one that people struggle to trust.
Because ultimately, people don’t interact with models—they interact with experiences.
Techronicler: What is a piece of common wisdom in tech that you completely disagree with?
Melissa Leide:
Right now, it’s the assumption that every AI product needs to be a chatbot.
Chat interfaces can be powerful, but they’re not always the best way for people to interact with AI. In many cases, AI works better when it’s embedded directly into workflows—surfacing insights in dashboards, assisting within forms, or augmenting existing tools.
The challenge is that the decision to build a chatbot is often treated as a technical or business decision, when it’s really a user experience question.
UX professionals bring value by understanding where AI fits naturally into someone’s workflow. Sometimes that’s conversational. Often it’s something more integrated and hybrid.
The goal shouldn’t be to build the most impressive interface—it should be to design the interaction that helps people do their best work.
Techronicler: The “broken rung” is a major barrier. How are you helping junior women move into leadership?
Melissa Leide:
My leadership philosophy centers around psychological safety.
Many women in tech grow up navigating unspoken expectations: don’t be too emotional, don’t be too direct, don’t take up too much space. Those pressures can make leadership feel risky.
I try to create an environment where people can show up as themselves and talk openly about the hard things—whether that’s career uncertainty, workplace challenges, or simply a tough week.
Sometimes my role is to offer guidance. Sometimes it’s to listen. And sometimes it’s to put my “friend hat” on and let someone vent.
But leadership also means advocacy. If someone on my team is being mistreated, dismissed, or struggling to have their neurodivergent needs respected, I will step in and support them.
I try to walk beside my team while also modeling what empathetic leadership looks like. I’m open about the fact that I don’t always get it right—and that vulnerability creates space for others to take risks and grow.
When people feel safe making mistakes and trying ambitious things, that’s when real leadership starts to emerge.
“AI will change how we build software, but UX will determine how people live with it.”
That profound insight from Melissa Leide perfectly captures the next frontier of technological innovation. The race to build the smartest foundational model is only half the battle; the real challenge lies in designing the collaboration layer between intelligent systems and the humans who rely on them.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, Melissa’s commitment to providing psychological safety and acting as a fierce advocate for her team is a masterclass in fixing the “broken rung” of leadership. Thank you, Melissa, for your vulnerability, your vision, and your leadership.
Melissa Leide is the Head of Experience Design at Caylent, where she helps organizations turn complex technologies—such as generative AI and large-scale data platforms—into products people can understand and trust. Her work sits at the intersection of UX, psychology, and emerging technology, with a focus on designing systems that augment human decision-making rather than replace it. Melissa is passionate about building inclusive environments for neurodivergent thinkers and redefining what leadership can look like in modern tech organizations.