Present and effective at every altitude.
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 isn't 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.
Your work is our work
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. On one engagement, a product and tech leadership team noted with some surprise that I’d referenced their technical strategy throughout my design review. My answer was simple: your work is our work. That isn’t a collaboration framework. It’s a worldview.
The best outcomes I’ve been 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, and I try to make it feel natural for everyone else to show up that way too.
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 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, with 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 the foundation. When psychological safety is real, teams become radically transparent, and that transparency builds the kind of 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. The clearest test I’ve had of it: I took a planned three-month sabbatical in the middle of a project, and the team kept the work moving without me.
This extends beyond any single project team. As one of two Principal Designers in the US at Thoughtworks, I directly manage a cohort of senior designers and researchers, and I volunteer as a connective point for a distributed US design community of 20+, driving craft standards, running growth and connection programs, and making the case for design with organizational leadership. Building people doesn’t stop at the edge of your immediate team.
Think bigger, design closer
The bigger the system, the easier it is to lose the human. I’ve worked on platforms built for a museum that welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors, for state agency administrators reviewing AI-generated compliance content, and for restaurant buyers tracking a delivery they need before the lunch rush. The scale changes. The closeness can’t.
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. That matters more now than ever: as AI systems move from analyzing to acting, the core design question becomes when a system should run on its own and when a person needs to see the decision first. You can only answer that well if you know the person.
Closeness also means designing for everyone. Accessibility is a conviction for me, not a checklist, and some of my most rewarding work has been meeting WCAG 2.1 AA on a government platform and designing accessible AR where no established patterns existed yet.
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.
Keep showing up
I don’t show up in big-bang moments. I show up consistently. I show up relentlessly. I show up because I care deeply. My teams know that on the days I’m buried in meetings, on the days everything is piling up, on the days I probably should have taken off, I have their backs completely. Every question gets my full attention. Every designer on my team knows I’m in their corner.
That consistency is the only way to hold complex work without dropping something. Each day, each moment, each choice builds toward the thing you’re trying to make.
You just have to keep showing up.
I came to design through a Master of Library and Information Studies, which is why I still think in terms of how people find, trust, and make sense of information. Outside of work I'm usually baking (scones, banana bread, and cookies are in steady rotation), out on my bike, reading science fiction and fantasy, or rolling dice in a Dungeons and Dragons game. I live in Madison, Wisconsin, where I also serve on the board of the Madison Public Market Foundation.