Ethos
Design leadership today demands a full-spectrum view. From aligning with executives on vision, to partnering with product and engineering on strategy, to sitting with a user who's confused and frustrated — you have to be present and effective at every altitude. That's not a job description. It's a practice. And the only way to hold it without dropping something is to build teams so grounded in trust, transparency, and communication that the right information reaches you at the right moment to make the right call.
Everything below is how I do that.
I don't experience design as a discipline that hands off to engineering or receives requirements from product. I experience it as one continuous act of making, shared across every person in the room. When I told a product and tech leadership team that I'd been referencing their technical strategy throughout my design work, and they noted it with some surprise, my response was simple: your work is our work. That's not a collaboration framework. It's a worldview. The best design outcomes I've been a part of happened when the boundaries between disciplines got blurry — when a developer caught a user experience problem before I did, or when a product manager pushed back on a design decision and made it sharper. I show up to every engagement looking for that. I try to make it feel natural for everyone else to show up that way too.
Your work is our work
Radical transparency, tailored growth
I don't have a one-size-fits-all approach to growing designers, because people don't work that way. Some people need a stretch opportunity and space to run. Some need structured feedback and a clear framework. Most need something in between that shifts over time. What I do consistently is start every manager-designer relationship by setting clear, mutual expectations — built on respect first, trust earned from there. I need my teams to feel like they can say anything, to me or to each other, at any time. That's not a nice-to-have. It's the foundation. When psychological safety is real, teams become radically transparent, and radical transparency builds the kind of deep trust that lets a team move fast, disagree well, and recover quickly. The outcome I'm proudest of isn't a product launch or a design system. It's the teams I've been part of where people were working hard, dealing with hard problems, and laughing their heads off at the same time. That's the signal that something real has been built.
This extends well beyond any single project team. As one of a small number of Principal Designers across the US at Thoughtworks, I've taken on a voluntary leadership role shaping the broader design community — serving as a connective point for 20+ designers, driving craft standards, and championing design's value with organizational leadership. Building people doesn't stop at the edge of your immediate team.
The bigger the system, the easier it is to lose the human. I've worked on platforms that touched hundreds of thousands of museum visitors, state government administrators managing public-facing compliance content, and restaurant buyers tracking a delivery they're counting on showing up before the lunch rush. The scale changes. The closeness can't. I believe that when you stay genuinely close to the people using what you're building — their context, their stress, their moments of confusion or confidence — you don't just make better products. You create the conditions for trust. And trust, at any scale, is what design is actually building. The boardroom work and the research session aren't two different jobs. They're the same job, held together by a team that communicates exceptionally well and a leader who never stops moving between the two.