ABOUT
Technical 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. Over 20 years, from consumer-facing automotive and mobile experiences to AI-native storage infrastructure and Kubernetes developer tools, that cross-stack depth has consistently been what closes the gap between what gets designed and what ships.
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
A working product in front of real users teaches you more than any amount of internal review. I favor releasing early, measuring what matters, and iterating on reality rather than assumptions.
Design the Journey, Not the Screen
I look beyond the product itself to understand context, mental models, and the full user journey. Every available signal, from behavioral data to direct observation, sharpens that picture.
Think in Systems
Good design isn't a collection of good screens. It's a coherent system where every decision reinforces the whole. I design components, tokens, and patterns that hold their integrity as products scale and teams grow.
Design Is a Conversation
The best ideas rarely come from a designer working alone. Product design isn't a handoff. It's an ongoing conversation between designers, engineers, and product thinkers that runs from the first sketch to the last release. I share work early and treat every bit of pushback as a signal worth investigating.
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.