Kat Downs Mulder is managing editor of digital at The Washington Post, driving the newsroom innovation strategy and helping ensure The Post is at the forefront of change in a rapidly evolving digital news environment. Most recently, Downs Mulder served as Vice President of Product & Design, leading the strategy focused on developing and refining The Post’s website, apps, internal tools and new products to expand the audience for The Post’s journalism, deepen connections with new and loyal readers and grow digital subscriptions. In this role, she reimagined the user experience across the homepage, article pages, newsletters and apps. Downs Mulder also improved the effectiveness of The Post’s paywall, creating a frictionless purchasing flow on the site and in apps, and launched a new onboarding experience that pointed new subscribers to more of what interests them. Downs Mulder previously led The Post’s award-winning Graphics department for almost five years. Under her leadership, the team adopted an intense digital focus that promoted original visual reporting, creative storytelling that leverages powerful tools, and presentations tailored to mobile and social platforms. The work won gold medals from Malofiej and the Society for News Design, and contributed to three Pulitzer prizes. With projects such as “Your Brain on Art,” “The N-Word Project,” “Sin Luz” and “The Waypoint,” as well as our first in-house ventures into augmented reality, Kat took a leadership role in cross-functional teams of graphics and video journalists, designers, engineers, reporters and editors that became models for how we organize our most ambitious and collaborative work today. Kat has worked at The Post since 2008, starting as a designer at washingtonpost.com and later becoming the innovations editor in the Graphics department and interactive projects editor before taking on her top leadership roles in Graphics. Before joining The Post, she worked at The Baltimore Sun. Her work has been honored by the Peabody Awards, the Society of Newspaper Design, the Online Journalism Awards and the Malofiej International Infographics Awards. She has also taught design and development at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Georgetown University.