Hi, I’m Roman Yanish

I create environments where people experience connection, creativity, and belonging.

For the last 15 years, I’ve built communities around experiences that bring people together over art, food, and stories. I partner with organizations to discover insights about their audiences and translate those findings into strategy.

Let's Collaborate

How Can I Help?

Audience Insight

Know your audience holistically. Understand their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors so your brand resonates deeply.

Dig In

Creative Strategy

Be intentional with your planning. Shape experiences, programming, and messaging that feel coherent and meaningful.

Let's Brainstorm

Community Engagement Design

Build a culture of belonging.
Create gatherings, events, and touchpoints that matter to your audience.

Let's Collaborate

600

Volunteer Hours Increase
Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

400%

Average Attendance Increase
Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op

50+

Workshops Facilitated
in the office and in the community

Schedule a Call

Case Studies

Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

Community Engagement | Audience Research

  • As Partnerships Catalyst at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, I led initiatives focused on strengthening community engagement, increasing membership participation, and developing strategic partnerships that supported the museum’s mission and long-term sustainability.

    My role focused on three distinct areas of engagement:

    • Membership

    • Volunteers

    • Interns

  • To build a world-class membership program addressing it’s lower-than-average retention rate, restore community partnerships with local universities, and fuel museum programming with strong intern participation.

  • Audience Research: I designed and conducted extensive mixed-method audience research, including surveys, interviews, data analysis and market analysis. This created a holistic view of our existing members and our broader community as well as the market environment.

    Redesigned Membership Structure: Using research insights, I restructured the membership program to reflect the values, motivations, and needs of the community. This redesign simplified decision architecture for museum visitors, segmented key demographics, and improved revenue forecasting.

    Communication Strategy: I designed and implemented audience segmentation based on user personas and journeys to create a more personalized, targeted approach to digital engagement. This meant creating pipelines for donor development, membership retention, and audience engagement based on data.

    Partnership Strategy: The MAH is a community-driven cultural institution. I invested heavily in collaborations with local universities, business owners, and community organizations to develop strategic partnerships to enhance the membership experience, increase community awareness, and encourage participation.

    • Increased volunteer participation by over 200%, resulting in over 600 hours increase in one year. This strengthened engagement with visitors in the galleries, provided essential resources for museum events, and strengthened key community partnerships.

    • Exceeded outreach goals by over 125%, fully staffing all available positions while creating new internship roles for several departments. This strengthened the MAH’s reputation in the community while also developing a key talent pipeline for future employment and partnership.

    • Created a plan for a $25,000 yearly increase in membership revenue, with specific action plans for addressing membership retention at every level.

    • A segmented audience communication plan with increased digital engagement from members and donors.

Vizient Inc. (Healthcare Data Tech)

Audience Research | Strategic Alignment

  • At Vizient, I led customer research for the redesign of a core technology platform. My role included research planning and scoping, facilitating internal alignment workshops, performing qualitative interviews, and insight synthesis.

  • This project asked,
    “How can we better support the users of this tool in their jobs overall?“
    “What do users do after they get the data they’re pulling out of this platform?”
    “How can we deliver more value?”

    To evolve the Supply Analytics platform into a user-friendly data insights tool that serves users at every stage of their supply chain decision-making.

    Supply Analytics had several known issues including long loading times, inefficient user interfaces, and limited capability. Our goal was to make it easy and enjoyable to use while understanding the broader workflows of the people using the technology.

  • Internal Alignment: After understanding the initial ask of the Product Owner, I facilitated a two-day internal alignment workshop with leads from Product Strategy, UX Design, Engineering, and Computer Science to identify the known and unknown changes to be made in the platform, identify potential risks, and develop storyboards for how different users interact with the platform to reach their distinct goals.

    Interview Sprint: Then, I performed qualitative interviews with 6 user groups ranging from Chief Supply Chain Officer to Data Analyst to create a holistic understanding of the ways that this platform fits into their broader workflow, identify key shortcomings, and explore potential opportunities.

    Insight Reporting: After conducting 17 interviews, I wrote a comprehensive research report outlining user behaviors, attitudes, and challenges as well as key implications for product strategy going forward.

  • Clearly defined user groups, behaviors, and jobs-to-be-done for a core technology platform.

    A comprehensive understanding of user behaviors, attitudes, pain points, and workflows as they relate to the tool.

    Evidence-based recommendations for interface design, UX decisions, and data methodology.

Ukiah Natural Foods Coop

Community Engagement | Marketing Strategy

  • This project asked “How can we create programming that is relevant, educational, and meaningful to this community?”

    Classes were averaging just 7 participants per session and we often canceled in advance due to insufficient interest. I was talked with creating an outreach strategy that created events and classes community members actually wanted to attend.”

  • Strategic Partnerships: I built relationships with local business owners to co-create curriculum for classes and events. This kept classes relevant, distributed marketing responsibility, and aligned with the co-op’s slogan that “together is better”.

    Marketing Redesign: I designed eye-catching, photography forward posts, posters, flyers, and banners that offered a fresh, lively approach to advertising.

    Data-driven digital engagement: I implemented A/B testing of email subject lines to determine what kind of messaging was most effective.

  • Average attendance inceased from 7 participants to 35 participants.

    Classes reached record-high levels for 3 consecutive months.

    New partnerships were built in the community, strengthening the Co-ops’s position as a community leader.

    Increased sales in the store each week after a class or event. 

Our Story

I’ve worked in experience design since 2013 and collaborated with industry-leading cultural institutions, large-scale technology enterprises, and top earning creators to design experiences that resonate with their audiences on a human level.

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History,

  • Exceeded outreach goals for internship recruitment by 125%

  • Increased volunteer participation by over 600 hours in one year

  • Reimagined the membership experience to reflect community values

At Vizient Inc.,

  • Led AI product strategy research across 8 healthcare data analytics platforms

  • Planned and facilitated over 50 cross-functional workshops aligned with strategic outcomes

At Ukiah Natural Foods Coop,

  • Revitalized a stagnant outreach program, scaling average class attendance from 7 to 35 participants

  • Supercharged a targeted sales initiative, increasing sales volume by over 300%

  • Boosted digital engagement, elevating email open and click-through rate

Today, I specialize in helping organizations create experiences, messages, and environments that resonate with their audiences.

My approach is human-centered, strategically focused, and value-aligned. I believe in designing experiences that create an environment of belonging, connection, and relevance.

Whether designing a product experience, building a creative community, shaping a cultural event, or telling a brand story, I’m interested in the moments that make people feel something real.