Hello…
I’m a customer-focused UX design leader with over twenty-five years of experience using systems- thinking and storytelling to deliver high-impact product experiences.
Experience
Design Commission
Co-Founder/Partner
2004–2017
As a Co-Founder and Design Director at Design Commission, I was primarily responsible for working with clients to identify goals and opportunities and then creating a plan to address them. Additionally, I handled job costing and resource planning, worked with our team to identify and execute design directions, and to coordinate production and implementation with our engineers.
Microsoft
Principal Design Manager, Data Platform
2017–2022
At Microsoft, I worked with my peers on our leadership team to craft a vision and strategy for our Data Platform products. Additionally, I led a globally distributed studio of over 30 people across four separate teams of design managers, UX designers, visual designers, and design engineers where my focus was on hiring, coaching, and enabling impact.
Arcadia
Head of Design
2022–2023
At Arcadia, a leading climate-tech start-up focused on decarbonization through energy analytics, I led the product design function including teams of designers for both the Community Solar and Arc data platform businesses.
Recent Work
I’ve been fortunate to work on a wide range of projects – from mom-and-pop websites to rich web applications generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Have a look at a few recent examples of work the teams I’ve led have done.
Design Leadership
As a manager and leader, I rely on learnings gathered from twenty-five years in the field.
Focus Areas
No two teams are the same. But all can struggle with similar challenges. I’ve focused much of my time leading teams in the following areas.
-
Scaling design orgs requires a variety of considerations – functional competency, partner team growth, roadmaps, and budget just to name a few. It’s also not usually linear so understanding how the team operates is critical for responsible growth.
-
Customer signal comes in many shapes and sizes. An org’s ability to tune into that signal and understand its broader implications is a collaborative effort. It’s also a function of culture and so having tools like the hypothesis progression framework can help teams be more successful at applying their knowledge.
-
All teams have unique cultures. As a leader, it’s critical that I understand that culture and where it’s empowering the team and where it’s hindering them. I’ve found culture building is one of the most important and valuable uses of my time as a leader.
-
Certainly a buzz-worthy topic, design systems took the industry by storm nearly a decade ago. Through my work with Brand.ai (which eventually became InVisions Design System Manager) I was fortunate to interact with a number of early luminaries in the space. Carrying that work forward at Microsoft to lead the Data Platform design system team I had first-hand experience in implementing an enterprise-scale design system. The short story is that design systems are much more than a Figma library. To be successful they require thoughtful partnership across design, research, PM, and engineering.
-
My first exposure to systems thinking came before I realized that’s what I was doing. As a youth volunteering with environmental organizations I was exposed to the complex systems in nature – “The Web of Life” as Fritjof Capra wrote. Working on platforms like Arcadia’s Arc data platform or Microsoft’s Purview, understanding multi-dimensional relationships of all kinds is required. Understanding technical dependencies, organizational processes, and customer contexts is a fundamental part of designing platforms, and most experiences.
-
As the saying goes, “it takes a village”. Product development is never done by a single function, much less a single person. The key to successful cross-functional collaboration lies in relationship building. I work hard to coach my teams on building stronger, more product cross-functional relationships with their peers in marketing, sales, product management, and engineering.
Rave Reviews