Who I Am

I’m a product designer and design leader with over a decade of experience working on the kinds of problems that don’t have obvious answers: large-scale platform integrations, data-heavy enterprise tools, AI-assisted workflows, and consumer experiences that have to work for everyone from a small business owner to an IT admin managing a global fleet.

I do my best work as a player-coach. That means I’m just as comfortable leading a team through ambiguity as I am deep in a hard design problem myself, and I think both modes make each other better. Managing designers has made me a more deliberate IC. Staying close to the work has made me a more credible and useful manager.

I specialize in complex systems. Not because simple problems aren’t interesting, but because I genuinely enjoy the part of the work where you have to understand something deeply before you can make it clear. Turning an 11,000-page website into a coherent experience, or figuring out how to give a non-analyst merchant useful financial insights, or designing a unified product out of two enterprise platforms with almost no functional overlap: those are the problems I find most engaging, and the ones I do my best work on.

I’ve worked across healthtech, fintech, enterprise, POS, destination marketing, and AI-enabled platforms. I’ve been the sole designer, the team lead, and the manager. I’ve built design systems, established review frameworks, developed designers, and shipped products. Sometimes all on the same team.

How I work

I tend to start further back than the brief. Most interesting design problems turn out to be different from the stated problem once you dig in, and the work I’m most proud of usually involved reframing the question before answering it.

I care about the structural work as much as the surface work: IA, content strategy, permission modeling, system architecture. Those decisions determine whether a product is coherent or just consistent, and getting them right early makes everything downstream faster and better.

When I’m leading a team, my job is to create the conditions for good work: clear direction, honest feedback, and enough psychological safety that designers can bring their actual thinking rather than what they think I want to hear. I’d rather develop someone’s judgment than review their output forever.

I also try to document intent clearly enough that the thinking survives me. Designs get handed off, teams change, priorities shift. Work that can only be understood by the person who made it has a short shelf life.

Outside the work

I paint. I have a vinyl collection that my future self won’t regret building. I’m a foodie who’s not bougie, but I am a pizza snob. I make my pizza dough and sauce from scratch, and I will put my chicken parm up against any restaurant in Austin. That is not a small claim and I stand behind it completely.

I sing. Actually sing. I’m a vocalist in a band and I’m writing originals. I spent a long time undercutting my karaoke with self-deprecating jokes, and I’m done with that pattern. It’s a real thing I do and I’m pretty good at it.

I have a dog named Melvin who gives excellent hugs and has strong opinions about where he sleeps. Spoiler: it’s wherever he wants.

I’ve lived in New Jersey, North Carolina, Las Vegas, and Austin.
Austin won out.
So far.

Oh, you’re still here?

If you’ve made it this far down a page all about me, you deserve something. Not that my singing is a reward exactly, but I’ve been told that watching me do a calypso song at a local dive bar is at least entertaining. So wherever you are, sing along, dance in your chair, and feel free to laugh. I do.