Twenty-five years of improving lives

I get the right people in the room early and keep them there. Good products don't come out of a design team working alone, so I bring product, engineering, research, and support into the problem solving rather than into a review at the end. I'd rather spend time up front building shared understanding than spend it later defending a decision. When a team agrees on the problem, I rarely have to sell them on the solution.

I may not be a founder, but I am an entrepreneur. I treat every team I join as if the company were my own, which means I learn how the business makes money before I try to redesign anything. I sit in on support calls, take the sales training, and ask what a missed quarter actually costs. I measure my work by what changed for the business and for the people using the product.

I've spent the last decade maturing how design gets done. I plan capacity so a team commits only to work it can actually finish, track UX in the same tools engineering uses so the work stays visible to partners, and run critique in a way that makes feedback useful instead of personal. I treat operations as a leadership discipline. When someone tells me we need to add something, my answer is always "Absolutely. What would you like to de-prioritize to make room?"

I care more about the designers I leave behind than the designs. I give feedback that is specific and usable, hand people work that stretches them a little past what they've done before, and tell them plainly when something isn't good enough yet. I write and mentor outside my own teams because the discipline gets better when people share what actually happened, including the parts that went badly. I want to leave a team that doesn't need me.