High standards,
low ego
In a career that’s old enough to have a driver’s license, I’ve been a designer, researcher, and product strategist. I built out a content strategy practice at a startup since acquired by Vonage, shipped BOPIS and BODFS for The Home Depot when retailers were just figuring out how to bridge physical and digital inventory, co-led a ground-up redesign of BetterCloud’s SaaS platform, and scoped and ran qual and quant research to validate ShootProof’s new monetization feature set.
I influenced the direction of the 0-1 product that became Mailchimp Stores, drove work that protected Square’s customers across our ecosystem against fraud and risk, optimized how money moves into Cash App, and led a team of incredibly talented international designers who overhauled the end-to-end Cash App Support experience.
All of this time wearing hats has made me the fully-rounded principal designer and leader I am today. I know what quality looks like across disciplines. I believe in equally setting a clear bar for excellence and investing in the people reaching for it: coaching, unblocking, and making sure folks get the opportunities to do the best work of their careers.
And as a hands-on designer, I supplement my ingrained and innate sense of quality and thoughtful design thinking with AI-assisted prototyping, synthesis, and systems modeling to reduce iteration cycles from weeks to days. My workflow combines product thinking, rapid coded prototypes, operational mapping, and LLM-assisted exploration to align teams faster and validate risky ideas earlier. This entire website is an example of a non-templated, custom prototype that I brought to life in less than a weekend.
"Uncovering Opportunities through Service Blueprinting"
Financial Services Team, Sponsored by Square
"Ambient Intelligence and Context Aware Computing"
State Farm Technology Thursday Roundtable, Sponsored by ISD-Digital Department
"The Future of Design"
People of Resource, Sponsored by IDSA
MA, English, Rhetoric & Composition
Georgia State University. Thesis: "The Visual Rhetoric of Craftsmanship."
BS, English, Rhetoric & Composition
Towson University
Certificate: Product Management
University of Maryland
I live in Colorado, where you’ll find me working on my Eichler-inspired house, tending a Japanese garden, and taking blurry photos of birds.
My hobby in elementary school was competing in Odyssey of the Mind — an industrial design competition for K–12 students. Probably explains a lot.
Graduated into the 2008 financial crisis. Design jobs were scarce, so I wrote awarded grants, managed programs, and built community infrastructure.
Graduate research on how visual language communicates credibility and trust — a question I've never stopped asking.
Built the content function from scratch — editorial calendar, brand voice, video production, and a full site redesign with an outside agency.
Shipped buy online, pick up in-store and buy online, deliver from store at a moment when retailers were scrambling to bridge physical and digital inventory.
Ground-up redesign of a complex enterprise SaaS platform. Built the design system from scratch, owned IA, and shipped Directory, Audits, Settings, and Help.
Started an LLC from scratch, no safety net. Closed ~$26M in transactions over four years — every deal entirely self-directed.
Took an after-work studio operations course to learn kiln loading and glaze mixing — upskilling to support my community and build my ceramics practice.
Scoped and ran qual + quant research to validate a new monetization feature set. Usability tests at trade shows, site visits, and a research repo built from scratch.
Foundational research and strategy for Mailchimp's first commerce product. Shipped in 2021.
Redesigned platform security for Financial Services. Drove 2FA adoption from 9% to 92.7%, reducing fraud loss by ~$250M.
Joined as Staff IC, promoted to manager. Led support, money movement, and health design (interim) — 8 designers, 57M users.
Growth and activation lead for Dash in Dropbox — embedding an early AI product inside a platform used by 700M+ registered users.
Stepped away from Dropbox for a caretaking sabbatical. Now having conversations with teams about what to build next.