About
Most people with my résumé stopped designing a decade ago.
I ran product and design organizations at Avetta for seven years: a product org of thirty and roadmaps that carried the company past a $3 billion valuation. Since 2025 I’ve been back in the work every day, designing and shipping for a Global Payments company. I’ve never stopped wanting both: the team and the work.
The short version
I can do the work, and I can build the team that does it.
The old line is that those who can't do, teach. I’ve spent twenty-five years doing both.
I've designed the flows, drawn the wireframes, built the design systems, and shipped the interfaces. I've also hired the designers, written the growth paths, set the research standards, and owned the roadmap that all of it served.
Most consultants have done one of those. Most executives stopped doing the other years ago. The reason I'm useful is that I never stopped moving between them — I know what a decision costs to build, what it costs to maintain, and what it does to a number somebody has to report at the end of the quarter.
That shows up in what I hand over. On one engagement it was mockups, usability testing, and then a document of epics and user stories written so the client’s product owners could drop them straight into their backlog. Most designers hand over a Figma file and leave the translation to someone else.
When a project needs something outside my range (motion, illustration, research at volume), I bring in people I’ve worked with before. What doesn't change is who's doing the design.
Origin
I've been rebuilding brands for new mediums since I was seventeen.
I could always draw. For a while I wanted to be an architect, which is what people told me to do with that particular skill.
What actually happened was the dot-com boom. I was seventeen, building websites by hand and learning early versions of Photoshop, and I spent my senior year of high school working for a company selling $9.99 dial-up internet in my hometown. Local businesses needed websites. I'd take a yellow page ad or a business card and build the site from that.
That's still the job. Something exists in one medium and has to work in another without losing what made it recognizable. I've been doing versions of that ever since — logos and brand collateral for companies and a university, templates and custom assets at an ad agency, and eventually product interfaces.
Then I watched software get used in the wild.
I left the agency for an automotive startup — restructuring their platform for scale, designing client websites, building templates for the internal software, and helping the sales team figure out how to price the work we were doing. The company grew and was acquired.
The part that changed my career was watching people at dealerships use the software. I could see the whole picture and the small details at once — how a screen worked, and what it was doing to customer satisfaction, revenue, and retention. Some interfaces I'd designed ended up in a presentation deck, and I was asked to move to the software side as a Senior UX Architect.
That's where the way I work now comes from. Design is a business decision. I learned that by watching one get made badly.
The pattern
Every job turned out to be the same job.
Nine years in automotive, then health and safety. Different industries, different products. In every one of them I ended up doing the same four things — establishing process, building teams, documenting how the work gets done, and rebuilding platforms so they could scale.
That's why Avetta hired me. They needed exactly that, and I'd done it enough times to know where it goes wrong.
- $1.5M
- Cut in annual design spend
- 25+ yrs
- Across product, systems, and brand
- 3
- Disciplines I can speak to directly
Two of us replaced a six-person external UX team, because we shipped faster
Automotive, health and safety, data infrastructure, nonprofit
Product, UX, and front-end development
I came in as a Principal UX Designer. Between myself and one other designer, we replaced a six-person external UX team and took $1.5 million a year of outside design spend off the books — not by working cheaper, but by being faster and hitting product goals sooner.
I could do that because I speak product, UX, and front-end. Nothing had to be translated between three groups of people before it could get built.
How I operate
Six things I hold myself to.
Not aspirations. The standard I work to, and what you can hold me to.
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People over process
Outcomes over ceremonyProcess matters. Outcomes matter more. Structure should speed a decision up, not slow it down.
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Don't settle for good
Craft“Fine” ships. “Better” wins.
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Everything speaks
ConsistencyWhat ships and what gets tolerated set the standard. Details build trust or erode it.
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Measure what matters
EvidenceSuccess gets defined before the work starts and checked after it launches. Opinion doesn't beat evidence.
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Say it early
CandorBad news doesn't age well. If something isn't working you'll hear it from me before it gets expensive.
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Show the work
Bias to buildDeliberation happens early. After that, I'd rather show you something than describe it.
Leadership
I knew there was a better way to manage people, so I went and did it.
I always knew I was a leader, and I wanted the responsibility. Avetta gave me the opportunity and it grew into a team of fifteen people reporting to me, inside a product organization of about thirty.
I'd worked for enough leaders by then to have opinions. There was a better way to treat people, and a better way to reward them. If I was going to manage anyone, the point was to help them become a better version of themselves.
Every person who reported to me was still at Avetta when I left, and every one of them had moved up. The ones who eventually went elsewhere left for bigger roles than the ones they had.
The processes, the growth paths, and the design system are all still in use. The org is still there, and so is the playbook.
The measure of managing people well isn't what they produced for you. It's where they ended up.
It’s also why advisory work is part of what I offer. Growing a designer takes time most teams don’t have, and it’s the work I’m proudest of.
In the numbers
Seven years of it, at scale.
- $3B
- Company valuation the roadmap ran through
- $285M
- Annual revenue owned — up from $100M
- ~30
- People in the product org I helped build
- 192
- Major initiatives shipped in 2021
- 7 yrs
- Leading product and design at Avetta
- 15
- Designers & PMs grown, then promoted
The record
For the people who want the receipts.
Seven years at Avetta, and two years since as an independent design lead.
- Design function for four products on a platform 5,200 nonprofits use
- WCAG 2.2 AA audits on two products; nearly all of 3,000+ violations resolved
- Shipped a full platform reskin and a rebuilt Online Bidding experience
- Led a 12-person design and research team across the US, UK, Australia and Ukraine
- Guided the team that named, designed and launched AskAva, the industry’s first generative AI risk assistant
- Shaped the roadmaps of all three VPs of Product during growth past a $3B valuation
- Executive sponsor for two top clients on APEX, Avetta’s product advisory board
- Brought in Fullstory and built the validation practice around it
- Website strategy: views +171%, sessions +189%, organic traffic +135%, qualified leads +58%
- Owned the roadmap for every product as revenue grew from $100M to nearly $285M a year
- Grew the product org from one project manager to thirty
- 60% increase in roadmap delivery year over year; 192 major initiatives shipped in 2021
- Brought in Amplitude as the product org’s analytics platform
- Cut $1.5M a year in outside design spend, replacing a six-person external UX team with two in-house designers
- Built Neptune, the design system behind Avetta Connect
- Led discovery, design, prototyping and testing of Avetta Connect, launched in 2018
Earlier
Education
BA, Applied Technology and Performance Improvement — University of North Texas
Certified SAFe® Product Owner / Product Manager · Certified Scrum Product Owner
Off the clock
A few things that aren't design.
This is my best friend. My wife.
It wasn't love at first sight. But I eventually stole her heart. Together we're unstoppable. Separate, we're average.
Guitar, and a Les Paul.
My dad, Peter, was a film composer. When I was young I heard the tone of a Les Paul during one of his recording sessions and that was that.
Hockey and baseball.
The Dallas Stars, win or lose. And the tough part of being both a Dodgers and a Rangers fan.
I won the 2001 24 Hour Video Race.
Twenty-four hours to write, shoot, and cut a short film. We won. It's the oldest evidence I have of doing good work fast under a hard constraint.
Work together
If your design problem is bigger than it looked from the outside, I've probably seen it.
Tell me what's going on. If I'm the right person I'll say so, and if I'm not I'll tell you that too.