Amber Small-Atkins

Amber Small-Atkins is the People & Culture Strategy and Operations Leader at Nielsen Norman Group, where she focuses on building the people infrastructure that helps NN/G run well — organizational design, culture, and the day-to-day systems that support a distributed team.

She brings over 10 years of people strategy and operational experience, with a particular strength in turning complex organizational challenges into clear, workable structures. Amber is known for building close partnerships across teams to connect people decisions to business outcomes.

Before NN/G, she spent her career at private equity-backed healthcare tech startups, where she led the strategic design and scaling of people programs through periods of rapid growth — including organizational development, change management, system optimization, and building internal processes from the ground up.

When she’s not building people systems, Amber can be found in the kitchen experimenting with new recipes, rolling dice at the D&D table, or spending time camping with her dogs.

She splits her time between Atlanta, Georgia, and Southern California.