Designer by trade, artist at heart
I make complex systems legible. The rest of this page explains how I got that way, how I work with teams, and what kind of problems get the best out of me.
Every messy system is hiding a simpler one. Government tools, enterprise platforms, operational software — they don’t start complicated. They accrue complication one policy, one exception, one quick fix at a time, until the people who depend on them are navigating the org chart instead of the work. My job is to find the simpler system underneath and hand it back to the people who use it.
That’s why my first artifact is almost never a screen. It’s a map — of the content, the roles, the states, the workflow. Get the structure right and the interface becomes almost inevitable. Get it wrong and no amount of polish will save it.
I started as a graphic and web designer after a high‑school web design class. Reading The Design of Everyday Things pulled me into UX — from then on, why people act the way they do mattered as much as how the design looked. The path since has run through federal agencies (USTR, NCI, HHS), a multi‑state real‑estate platform serving working professionals, e‑commerce brands, and two products of my own.
That sequence taught me something specific: the hardest and most valuable design work happens in systems people are required to use — government tools, professional platforms, operational software. In those systems, clarity isn't a brand value; it's the whole job.
I work at the seam between design and engineering. With product managers I define scope and sequence; with stakeholders I facilitate toward decisions rather than presentations; with engineers I hand off work that anticipates real constraints — and often build the front end myself. Having shipped my own products end to end, I know what a design costs to build, and it shows in what I choose to draw.
Working solo on founder products also taught me the opposite skill: knowing when to stop designing and start validating. Scope is a design material.
Discovery to delivery, without the theater
Away from the screen: nature, yoga, music, and building small things for the joy of it. The wellness thread in my founder products isn't market analysis — it's the world I actually spend time in, which is why I trust myself to design for it.
Exploring Senior Product Design opportunities — full-time, contract, or consulting; remote, or hybrid in the Washington, D.C. / Maryland region.