About
Product Design Leader & Creative Engineer with 20+ years bridging design and development.
I'm a designer by craft with the engineering fluency to build what I design and speak the language of the teams I work with. I've been coding alongside my design work since long before AI made that possible for anyone else, and that depth is what lets me push a first AI draft into something actually ready to ship.
My career spans nine industries, from telephony and web hosting in the early 2000s to AI-native storage infrastructure and Kubernetes developer tools today. What actually makes a product succeed is the same thing it's always been: the ability to design and iterate it into something people want.
I've been a founding-era hire four times, which means I know what it takes to build from scratch, make decisions under uncertainty, iterate fast, and create processes that scale.
"A design isn't done when it looks right. It's done when it works."
At MinIO, I led a team of 4 designers building AIStor Console V1 from the ground up, translating exabyte-scale storage infrastructure into an accessible web interface. I also established an AI-augmented Figma-to-code pipeline that reduced design drift by 90% and built a 100+ component website design system that let non-designers ship pages independently. On the team side, I ran AI workflow workshops that expanded the team's output across prototyping, content production, and design exploration.
At HONK Technologies, I joined as the 3rd hire and built the design practice from day one. Over seven years I owned every design surface: early funding prototypes, brand identity, consumer apps, a tow operator platform, and white-label enterprise products for clients including Farmers Insurance. A research-driven redesign of an accident photo capture flow took acceptance rates from 14% to 96%, one of several projects where iterating on real data made the difference.
I care as much about how design functions across an org as about what ships. The best work I've been part of came from teams that learned from each other, where a shared understanding of the problem made the solution better than any one person could have made it alone.
I treat AI as a design material, not a feature. I've used it to automate handoff cycles, build custom tooling, and design products where AI is doing real work for the user. Not to replace craft, but to make more room for it.
Disciplines
What I Do
AI Integration
Practical AI tooling woven into real workflows and built into real products. I've shipped AI-augmented design pipelines, LLM interfaces, and tools that cut cycle time across design, development, and content production.
Design Leadership
Player-coach leadership across founding-era startups and established product teams. I shape design direction, build systems and processes from scratch, and stay in the work alongside the people I lead.
Design Craft & Research
Hands-on design grounded in research and measured by outcomes. I've worked across industries including consumer automotive, mobile, enterprise developer tools, and AI infrastructure, always coming back to the same foundation: find signal in data and translate it into products people actually use.
Design Engineering
Enough engineering depth to build what I design, close the gap between Figma and production, and work as a true peer to engineering teams. I've built component libraries, design token systems, and custom tools on both sides of the stack.
How I Work
Philosophy
Ship to Learn
I believe products are better understood through reality than theory. I favor releasing early, putting ideas in front of real users, and learning from what actually happens rather than spending too long designing in a vacuum. The goal isn't to get everything right before launch—it's to create something worth learning from.
Design the Journey
A product is never experienced one screen at a time. I believe great design considers the context, expectations, and decisions that surround every interaction. The goal isn't to perfect individual moments, but to create an experience that makes sense from beginning to end.
Think in Systems
Good design isn't a collection of good screens. It's a coherent system where each decision strengthens the whole. I believe thoughtful systems create consistency without limiting creativity, allowing products to evolve while teams move faster and design remains intentional.
Design Is a Conversation
The best products are rarely the work of one person. They emerge from different perspectives, disciplines, and experiences coming together around a shared problem. I believe the strongest ideas come from an open conversation between everyone shaping the product, where questions, challenges, and disagreement make the work better.
Toolkit
Skills
AI & Technical Craft
- AI Product Design
- LLM-Augmented Design Workflows
- AI-Assisted Rapid Prototyping
- Agentic UX
- Prompt Engineering for Design
- Figma MCP
Design
- Figma
- Design Systems
- Interaction Design
- User Research
- Prototyping
- Information Architecture
- Systems Thinking
- Complex Data Visualization
- Journey Mapping
- Motion Design
- Brand Identity
- Illustrator
- Typography
Engineering
- React & TypeScript
- Ruby on Rails
- JavaScript
- SQL
- CSS Architecture
- HTML
- Component Libraries
- Accessibility (WCAG)
- Design Token Systems
- Webflow
- Git
Process & Leadership
- Player-Coach Leadership
- Design Strategy
- Hiring & Mentorship
- Design Ops
- Cross-functional Facilitation
- Workshop Facilitation
- Data-Driven Design
- Product Analytics
- Behavioral Analytics
- Stakeholder Management
- User Interviews
- Usability Testing
- A/B Testing
- Sprint Facilitation
- Competitive Analysis
20+ years of work,
one document.
Let's build something.
Open to new projects, collaborations, and conversations.