Ending a deadlock on a $25M feature
scope workshop · 2025
Kind to people, hard on assumptions.
I lead design and research for multi-product platforms, so several teams’ work adds up to one experience for the customer.
Most of my job is getting everyone onto one shared picture.
now
- Growth design & analytics at Popfly
- Product design & strategy at Butcher Built
before
- Director, experience strategy at Mastercard
- Solutions architect, enterprise architecture at Zions Bancorporation
- Senior digital strategist & UX architect at Valtech
- Senior UX designer & front-end developer at 42connect
Customers deal with one company, and they notice each seam where many teams’ efforts don’t quite line up. I’ve done this work in banking, payments, security and healthcare, places with more products than anybody planned and someone who only wants to book an appointment or move money. As I see it, the job is looking after the whole: what connects, what merges, and what shouldn’t exist yet.
That takes people from rooms that rarely talk: engineering, finance, marketing, support. I’ve spent time in most of them, writing front-end code, presenting technology roadmaps to a bank’s governance boards, and researching what buyers would really pay for. So I’m comfortable in a design critique and a pricing conversation, sometimes on the same day.
work
Nobody owned it,
so we did.
The problems that matter most on a platform tend to fall between teams, where no roadmap claims them. Some of these were missing pieces, some were stalled arguments, and another was a product that shouldn’t have been built. Each started with questions no one was assigned to answer.
From no data to a shared answer
analytics foundation · 2025
Research saves $6M of budget
generative research · 2024
Building a UX practice from zero
team and practice building · 2022 to 2026
Twenty-two sites into one
site consolidation · 2020 to 2021
build
Feet to ground, hands to tools.
Leaders who stop making things lose their feel for what’s easy and what isn’t. I keep building, mostly with AI tools, so my sense of effort stays close to the people doing the work.
Foundry
multi-agent build pipeline · in use
Claude Code, Codex, Next.js, Playwright
WCAG Engine
accessibility audit platform · live
TypeScript, Playwright, axe-core, Claude API, SQLite
Identity service
first-party identity for Popfly · live
Webflow Cloud, RB2B, n8n
lead
Firm on who,
loose on how.
I keep one map of the team. Along with who owns what and who people turn to for help, it tracks where each person wants to grow, which is the part most org charts leave out. Staffing and funding asks come from that map, so people get growth they chose and the company gets a design group that helps set the plan.
Person
Ownership people
can find.
Product partners should know which designer to call, and designers should know which teammate to ask. I shape ownership around how the company already works so both answers are obvious.
Goals they wrote,
tied to yours.
Each quarter we write personal goals against what the business needs. I assign work to match, so growth and delivery follow the same plan.
I coach judgment,
not process.
Most of our 1:1 time goes to the moments when a partner is stuck and the next move isn’t obvious. That judgment looks different on every team.
Team
Problems route
sideways first.
Specialties help the team answer most questions together. That keeps me out of the critical path and makes it clear who the senior people are.
The team owns
the quality bar.
A weekly roundtable and design review decides what we improve and who leads it, so standards hold whether or not I’m in the room.
Stuck work gets a
second pair of hands.
When something stalls I work alongside the designer. They keep ownership of the project, build their judgment, and need less of me the next time.
Company
The customer gets
a seat at the table.
Product brings the business case and engineering brings what’s feasible to build. Design brings what customers need, and I make sure that carries equal weight when we decide what to build.
Name the gaps
out loud.
Some products won’t have a designer. I make the cost visible in customer and business terms, so staffing is a decision we make together instead of a quiet backlog.
Team shape is
a design decision.
Structure shapes retention and the quality of the work, so I design it with the leaders it serves.
The map is the one constant.
Each company gets its own version, and the work changes with it.