Thirty years in, and I’m more optimistic than ever.

What I believe

At scale, design stops being a craft you practice alone and becomes a discipline you teach and defend. The question I keep coming back to is simple to ask and hard to answer: what does it actually take for someone to understand what we’re asking of them?

I built a framework around that answer; I call it the cost of comprehension.

How I lead

I didn’t set out to lead. I love the craft, so when this role came along, my first instinct was caution, not ambition. I started by stabilizing the team and keeping what already worked.

That restraint paid off. Then, as my confidence grew, so did my willingness to push. We worked to increase velocity, ambition, and accountability. We grew workflow efficiencies and systems thinking which helps with rapid prototyping. We got nimble with quick, directional user testing instead of broad or self-insistent test phases; tighter answers in fewer cycles. A good chunk of the job now is architecture that never shows up in a screenshot: building the shared language across brand, product, and engineering that lets three groups with three different incentives move as one.

I’ve been lucky to learn from some genuinely sharp product and design leaders over the years, and I think of my own leadership as paying that forward: building my team’s fluency with the business itself, insisting they ask hard questions, and helping them find real ownership in the work. That same instinct is why I’m excited about AI as a working tool rather than worried about it as a threat: it’s one more thing worth getting good at together.

None of this makes for tidy case studies; good leadership rarely does. What I can point to instead is a set of fundamentals I trust, a habit of asking the bigger question when the room wants the easy one, and enough resilience earned over thirty years to meet whatever this field turns into next with curiosity instead of dread.