Principles
A working set of operating principles — how I run teams, systems, and myself. Subject to revision by experience.
Everything is backed by craft
Nineteen years in design: six in graphic design, thirteen in product. Management, strategy, systems thinking, any new direction I take is built on that foundation, not instead of it. I stay close enough to the pixels to hold the bar and far enough to never be the bottleneck.
Systems over heroics
If quality depends on someone staying late, the system is broken. Clear process beats heroics under chaotic conditions: it's why our design handoff ends in a GitHub repo, not a meeting, and why I measure the design system by its governance, not its component count.
Net-positive trajectory
The sum of my decisions has to be right; any individual decision doesn't. I decide fast, correct course openly when I'm wrong, and don't spend energy defending yesterday's call. Bold beats conservative when the upside is asymmetric.
Design pays its way
Design earns its seat by moving numbers the business runs on: default rates, retention, conversion, exposure. I hold my team's work, and my own, to that standard, and I build the measurement infrastructure to prove it.
Foundations before headcount
A team inherits whatever systems exist on the day they join. Build the infrastructure first, then hire into it. The other order turns every new person into coordination cost.
The team is the product
My job isn't to be the best designer in the room, it's to build the room: leads who carry the quality bar without me, ownership structured so the org chart matches the product, and growth treated as part of the job, not a perk.
Product work always comes first. The interesting question is what happens between deliverables: idle time converts into a pull-based capability backlog that serves the company's growth goals. Tasks are sized small, medium, or large; any available designer pulls the top one that fits their time, one open task per person. When product work returns, they hand off in two lines and go back. No guilt.
The backlog runs on four tracks: design system maintenance and governance, expansion into data, research and marketing, a severity-ranked UX debt register, and individual growth. Every designer carries a quarterly growth goal and teaches what they learned in a monthly skill-share. Every closed task shows up in the team's update to the company, so the work is visible, not just done.
The cadence is light by design: a design weekly, two to three design reviews a week, regular 1:1s, and a fifteen-minute weekly review of the backlog. Process exists to serve shipping. When a ritual stops earning its time, it goes.