Summary
Design leader with 20+ years building product design culture, systems, and teams from the ground up. Three founding-era hires. Proven ability to define design strategy, establish process and ops, mentor designers, and align design with business outcomes. Equally skilled at the strategic — setting design direction, managing stakeholders, facilitating OKR alignment — and the craft-level, shipping polished products with rigorous execution. Track record of transforming reactive design into proactive design leadership.
Experience
MinIO — AI Infrastructure & Object Storage
- Owned design strategy and execution for AIStor Console — MinIO's flagship AI-native storage platform
- Built design system from 0→shipped, establishing component standards across product and engineering teams
- Established design ops workflow: Claude-assisted Figma↔Code pipeline, code-to-Figma automation for design drift elimination
- Created MinIO website design system enabling non-designers to ship UI consistently; eliminated design bottleneck
- Facilitated Figma learning sessions; scaled design thinking across engineering-heavy organization
- Partnered with executive stakeholders to align design direction with product and business OKRs
Ambassador Labs — Developer Infrastructure
- Led UX strategy for Telepresence developer tooling across VS Code extension and web interfaces
- Drove 30+ contextual interviews to shape product roadmap; presented findings to leadership
- Achieved +30% developer efficiency and −60% onboarding time through research-driven redesign
- Established UX process and documentation standards within a fast-moving engineering culture
HONK Technologies — Roadside Assistance SaaS (Founding-Era Hire)
- Joined as a founding-era hire; built and led the design practice across 7+ years of company growth
- Established design process, tools, rituals, and culture from scratch in engineering-first environment
- Drove accident photo acceptance 35% → 96% through structured research and iterative testing
- Led 200+ participant usability studies; built internal research capability and testing cadence
- Mentored junior designers; ran design critiques, established feedback culture and quality standards
- Partnered with product and engineering leadership to align design priorities with company OKRs
Senyo Corp — Design Consultancy
- Founded and ran independent design consultancy; managed all aspects of client relationships and delivery
- Delivered brand identity, product design, and web development for diverse client portfolio
Fonality — VoIP & Business Communications (Founding-Era Hire)
- Early hire managing software team; developed product direction and team delivery processes
- Cross-functional role spanning engineering management, product design, and front-end development
Leadership Skills
Design Strategy
Design Systems Strategy, Design Ops, Process Creation, Team Enablement, OKR Alignment, Stakeholder Management, Design Direction
Craft & Execution
Figma, Interaction Design, Prototyping, User Research, IA, Usability Testing, A/B Testing, Motion Design
Team & Culture
Mentorship, Design Critiques, Hiring, Figma Training, Sprint Facilitation, Cross-functional Collaboration, Remote Team Leadership
Engineering Fluency
Component Libraries, Design Tokens, WCAG Accessibility, shadcn/ui, CSS, Git
Leadership Highlights
From 0
Built — and rebuilt — design practice across three engineering-first companies. At Fonality and HONK I joined before a design function existed and built one from the ground up: process, tooling, critique culture, documentation standards, quality bar. At MinIO the foundation was there but the practice needed a serious upgrade — I overhauled the workflow, introduced rigorous design systems methodology, established Figma↔Code standards, and created the ops infrastructure that let design scale without becoming a bottleneck. In each case the environment was skeptical of design by default; the work was earning the credibility to make design decisions matter, then building the systems to sustain that influence.
Ops
Designed the ops layer, not just the product. At MinIO I identified that the real bottleneck wasn't design quality — it was the gap between what was designed and what got built. I built a Figma↔Code automation pipeline that synced live component states back into Figma automatically, eliminating drift without requiring designer oversight on every PR. I also created a MinIO website design system that enabled non-designers to ship consistent UI independently. The result: design influence without design becoming a bottleneck.