Product Experience Architecture
Calm within complexity.
Where human needs meet technical, organizational, and regulatory complexity, I shape trustworthy product experiences around the people involved—with craft and rigor across CLI, GUI, API, and agentic surfaces, and the service ecosystems between them.
What I do
Design lives in the space between what a product can do, and what a person can confidently do with it. I close that gap: getting the software out of the way so that people can get on with what they hired it to do. Yes, I make things pretty—but the systems between the code and the pixels, are my happyplace. Delight is always the goal, because end-user empowerment does translate to customer ROI.
Day to day I develop workflows, shape information architecture, explore interactivity, write design principles, and help teams converge before they build three versions of the same thing. I also study the cowpaths users carve, then pave them with the broader system in mind—on 0-to-1 builds and late-maturity products alike—so today's release never taxes tomorrow's.
How I work
Lead with inquiry
Questions before conclusions. Indulgent, full-throated explorations of ideas that are strictly timeboxed yet persist across cycles, to quickly identify and separate the fleeting from the worthwhile. Granting myself occasional space to purge my own urges of heroics and probe stubborn assumptions. Discovery that isn't a phase, but continuous and iterative cycles that run alongside delivery. User research, customer interviews, brainstorming with the human team, brainstorming with my AI agent friends. Every time I've thought I got it right out the gate, I proven myself wrong by pushing just a little harder. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Where are ownership boundaries across internal BUs and with an external partner?
What are the trainers burdened to teach, vs where can they add the most value?
Who needs to do what, and in which order? Service Blueprints deliver.
Bring people in
Design practitioners are not keepers of some guarded skill or mystical talent. I invite developers, PMs, and SMEs into the product design process, build critique structures and provide encouragement so that non-designers can meaningfully contribute, and co-design with users as opportunities arise. When privileged to work on a team with other designers wrangling adjacent problems, I break project silos to bring folks together to learn from and inspire one another. The best design is rarely a brilliant idea from one mind, alone.
State policy executives workshopping content, fresh from user-testing ride-alongs.
Non-profit directors giving tangible shape to what didn’t exist with storymapping.
Sharing research outcomes with customers so they can see the value of their participation.
Shared foundations
Decision Trees, Working Agreements, RASCIs, Design Principles, and Team/Project Charters are some of my favorite tools. I love collaboration, and I love healthy conflict. Toxic conflict kills the buzz, elevating egos at the expense of magic, shared growth, and our best deliveries going to market. Serendipity, fun, and flow happen most naturally, when the foundations of co-created intent are present. What my teenage self used to see as stuffy, my grownup self has come to embrace as liberation. Radical cooperation: something humans were not hardwired to do, but doggone it, I love coming to work every dang day committed to making possible.
Design Principles brought down to Earth and made actionable for everyone.
Decision tree mapping of concerns in a complex migration, to guide prioritization discussions.
Design Principles authored by cross-functional teammates, mapped for evaluating solutions.
Prototype early + often
Prototyping is a means to vet assumptions, identify possibilities, and uncover surprises in GUI and service experiences; not just a shiny device to present from or use in testing. Making behavior and workflow paths legible before I or my teammates know what we think—in Figma, in code, with task-specific devices and a table in an empty office, with PDFs, or with cut paper—beats debating abstractions and missing goldmines of opportunity. Prototyping imperfection and unknowns is a critical means of discovery; for an entire flow as block diagrams, for isolated interactions, or just for critical transitions. I design systems of patterns and journeys to meet user outcomes. Nested rectangles in sequence across a flat canvas can't cut that mustard alone.
QT IDE prototype co-created with a developer to expose gaps & opportunities. Ugly by design.
Typeform prototype built to evaluate one flavor of content and interaction patterns.
Axure prototype built to evaluate a very different flavor of content and interaction patterns.
Show up
I work as a partner: with product, with engineering, and in service to my management, where "how can I help you?" is a standing offer I’m present to run with. I engage as a player: doing the work, shipping with every sprint—some sprints significant releases, some invisible (to me) a11y fixes that matter just as much. I'm present as a coach: mentoring through critique, pairing, along with providing and seeking formal mentorship, and always looking for ways to bring other people's perspectives and contributions into work that ships. Riding those trajectories while following my beacons, is my model of design leadership. Forever a student, and always accountable for the example I set. Individual excellence matters. Collective excellence lasts.
projects
cloudflare + apple
My first project at Cloudflare had me working with four different cross-functional teams over several months, on a mobile-first update to Cloudflare's Registrar product to support both Cloudflare customers, and Apple's iCloud customers.
securedrop workstation
SecureDrop was built in 2013 as an open-source, self-hosted communication platform for high-risk whistleblowers and news organizations. Today it is used by over 70 NGOs and newsrooms, worldwide.
In 2018 I was hired by its stewarding non-profit to lead user research and design efforts for its new workstation product.
california’s dmv
In 2017 California's DMV had been struggling for 2 years to overhaul its driver license application. Governor Jerry Brown intervened, and "Just a f*ing form" blossomed into an epic service design project for 36MM constituents, ~6,000 DMV employees, and our small project team.
It was my first experience with govtech, and an opportunity to work with some amazing folks from 18F, USDS, scores of dedicated career public servants, and a few COBOL guys pulled from retirement.
adaptive
Adaptive’s decades-old products were loved by IT professionals, yet alien and unapproachable to business users. This project was a 4 month engagement to help guide them back on track, and with a quick-to-market mobile-first experience for business users to demonstrate their commitment to change.
t-mobile customer care
T-Mobile engaged Adobe's enterprise consulting team after learning about the success we'd had re-designing Adobe's own call center CRM. For 9 months I lead a project to meet and exceed that goal for T-Mobile, on behalf of Adobe consulting's UX team.
perforce commons
Commons was a SAAS product for business users, developed to mimic the versioning and collaboration benefits Perforce was known for among software developers. I was hired to extend its design system to support responsive behaviors across devices, refine its visual language, and to develop interaction workflows to bridge gaps introduced with its Dropbox integration.
equaltogether
My second venture into foundership. This time with YC and a seed investor's support, and the painfully lofty goal of solving for social inequities in the workplace. "The frenzy of workplace diversity, quantified."
hera ticketing + crm
My first venture into foundership. With a benefactor's support and in collaboration with Burning Man LLC, we shaped a CRM to bring electronic ticketing, community values, and transparency in ticket reselling, to the troubled marketplace of high-demand ticketing.
special olympics
My first project with Adobe's consulting team, partnering with Special Olympics of Northern California's leadership to identify and shape opportunities to streamline their marketing, fundraising, and event operations needs, with a combined new website and vendor integrations. All strategy, no pixels; incredible pride in what my peers delivered, while I was off working on other projects.
earlier work
Yahoo!, Palm, AOL, and my previous adventures in print and packaging design. All within the wrapper of my now very-old HTML website. Not worth writing proper case studies about, but I still get a kick out of my old site—and am still proud of the work itself.
about
I was born in a Michigan blizzard in January, and fell for design as a teenager through Andy Warhol's expressive work on Interview magazine. At California College of the Arts I studied graphic and industrial design, where the Aeron chair and OXO's peeler showed me what research, craft, and rigor in iteration make possible: form and function to equal measures of excellence, every detail earning its place by making someone's life better.
My early career ran through publication design (including *surface and Wired), packaging design and art direction for action sports companies, and litigation exhibits for patent lawsuits. In 2004 a fluke gig in digital was supposed to be take-the-money-and-run. Instead, I found my people.
Since then: Yahoo! in the Web 2.0 era, contributing to one of the industry's first design systems. Enterprise consulting with Adobe. A YCombinator-backed nonprofit of my own. Several years spent in public interest tech with SecureDrop, QubesOS, Tor, and California's DMV. Platform design for infrastructure at Cloudflare and HashiCorp. Twenty years in, the throughline is unchanged: complex systems, high stakes, and the people who deserve better from both.
I live with my partner and two mischievous cats on a Christmas tree farm at the base of Mt Hood, in semi-rural Oregon. My favorite thing in the whole wide world, is still snow.
My beacons
Service. To systems; to users; to relationships; to purpose; to the business. My currency is relationships, not transactions.
Inquiry. To inform empathy; to create shared understandings; to uncover opportunities; to drive innovation; to make work more fun.
Excellence. In craft. In solutioning. In collaboration. How to balance all three with also just getting sh*t done, my own command for excellence in how I work.
Grace. Excellence in balance with kindness, to others and to myself. Reward good intentions. Honor impact. Centering humans in the work, needs to begin with centering our shared humanity at work.
Inclusion. People of every ability, age, and background deserve digital experiences that leave them feeling capable and empowered. Not "compliance;" designing and building for everyone within targeted personas.
Trust. I spent years designing security tools for journalists, activists, and whistleblowers. Trust and clarity weren't brand values in that work. They were the product. That conviction now shapes everything I design.
Fun. We do better work and as teams we aspire to greater heights when joy, kindness, and emotional safety are part of our everyday. Work hard, be human, and don't forget to have fun.
