How I think about leadership

Lead through doing

The best way to lead a team is by jumping into the trenches and working with them. You can’t make good decisions if you don’t understand the problem up close. I dedicate the bulk of my 1:1 time with my direct reports directly working on projects with them — in Figma, using Claude, or simply just whiteboarding. The team levels up from both my direct feedback and watching the way I work.

Build deep domain understanding

Design is always more successful when they have a deep understanding of their domain — from customer context, to data models. I push my teams to spend time understanding what’s going on in our user’s world. What brings them to our product today? We also spend time with our engineering counterparts to understand our product’s data models, ensuring our design solutions are efficient and scalable.

Build strategy through vision

Vision can take many forms, from quickly crafted Claude prototypes, leveraging real data and product limitations, to longer-term illustrations of a future product, told through storyboards, narrative decks and conceptual wireframes. Showing is better than telling, and developing a compelling vision aligns the whole team toward a shared idea of the future.

Build culture with intention

Teams don’t magically work well together. I guide my teams to be intentional about how we work together. I regularly reflect on our formation, where the team is strong and what skills need exercising to make team culture stronger and more effective. I help grow the team to fill missing skills gaps, both through hands on coaching and through effective hiring.

My design superpowers:

Systems Thinking

Local decisions can have global effects. I believe when working within a complex product, it is imperative that we understand the larger system and how our decisions impact the system.

I bring a strong systems thinking orientation to the teams I work with.

Simplifying complexity

Even the most complex domains can be broken down into easy-to-understand parts. I’m not afraid to jump into the complexity and can effectively simplify the story to the degree necessary for various audiences.

I help teams understand the difference between important nuance and distracting detail.