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.
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: what each person owns, what they’re the go-to for, and where they want to grow next. Who takes which work, who helps whom, and what we ask the business to fund all come from it.
Each person gets growth they chose, the team solves most problems without me, and the company gets a design group that’s easy to plan around.
Person
One product,
one specialty.
Each designer owns a product’s design and research, and is the team’s go-to for one specialty. Everyone knows who to ask and what they own.
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.
Our 1:1s work on reading a room, saying “not yet,” and choosing the next move when a partner is stuck. Each team needs different judgment.
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
Talk before it
becomes a ticket.
Every request starts with a conversation about the outcome, what each team needs, and the dates involved. That gives you timelines you can plan around.
Cover the gap
and count it.
Products without a designer get what we can give. I track what that costs and use the count to build the headcount case I bring you.
Team shape is
a design decision.
Structure changes retention and work quality, so I’d design it for your company and expect it to look different from the last one.
The map is the one constant. Each company gets its own version, and the work changes with it.