Director-level product designer, fifteen years deep, equally at home leading a team through a thorny systems redesign as I am wireframing in a coffee shop at 9pm. I build quietly opinionated products — and the conditions that let good products happen.
Most of my career has been in environments where the stakes are high and the systems are complicated: newsrooms publishing around the clock, government teams trying to make public services less painful, enterprise platforms used by thousands of editors, and consumer products competing for attention in increasingly chaotic digital spaces. I like untangling complexity. I like helping teams figure out what problem they're actually trying to solve. And I like making products feel more intuitive, useful, and human on the other side of that process.
I've led design work at places like Arc XP, Dow Jones, and the United States Digital Service, partnering closely with product, engineering, editorial, research, and executive leadership teams. Sometimes that's meant building long-term design systems and organizational structure. Sometimes it's meant facilitating difficult alignment conversations. Sometimes it's meant opening Figma at midnight and fixing the thing myself because the deadline is tomorrow and the experience still isn't right.
"I care a lot about clarity. I care a lot about trust. Good UX is often less about adding delight and more about removing friction, ambiguity, and unnecessary cognitive load."
My background spans both enterprise and consumer experience design, which means I tend to think about products from multiple angles at once: business goals, editorial needs, technical constraints, accessibility, user psychology, and the reality that most people are busy, distracted, and just trying to get through their day.
I'm also probably more collaborative than precious. I like workshops. I like whiteboards. I like hearing the sentence, "Okay, now I finally understand the problem." The best product work I've been part of has never come from a lone genius designer. It comes from smart people collectively getting closer to the truth.
My father was from Rhode Island and my mother is from Peru — we somehow ended up in Texas when I was 10 and I claim it as my home state. To quote the late great Molly Ivins: "I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults." I have two beautiful children, Mira (nearly 7) and Samson (just turned 3).
I'll re-anchor on the user before we touch a pixel. If we can't say their job in one sentence, the design will not survive contact with the world.
The unsexy version usually ships, scales, and tests well. I push for the obvious answer first — then earn the right to be clever.
Boxes and arrows on a whiteboard prevent ten Figma files from being wrong in parallel. I default to the cheapest possible artifact.
Empty states, error states, the moment after success. Most products fall apart at the seams; I obsess over the seams.
Humor is a leadership tool. A team that laughs together ships harder things. I'm not solemn, and I don't hire solemn.