Design Leadership
Core Values
What motivates me to keep growing as a leader.
Authenticity
Honesty, transparency, and empathy are essential to a functioning design team. This means creating psychological safety to give the team the freedom to speak up, question, and take risks.
Agency
Life is too short to be micromanaged. Treat your folks like adults and grant them the power to take action and make choices. Hold them accountable for their actions and choices. Guide and correct when necessary.
Collaboration
A team that works together wins together. Get the team to work with each other, across projects, across silos, in twos and threes and more, regardless of job title.
Measurement
What's working? What can be better? KPIs and OKRs are a start, but a good measurement practice combines quantitative metrics with qualitative data — and results.
Moxie
Determination. Drive. Accept critique as an opportunity to improve. Be better today than you were yesterday. Never stop working on yourself.
Team Philosophy
What drives me is creating amazing user experiences by empowering creative teams to innovate, collaborate, and deliver — together.
Design is a team sport.
The best design ideas can come from everywhere, not just designers. Good designers aren't composers, spending time toiling over a rigid score for someone else to play the way they intended. Instead. designers are more orchestra conductors, who find the best ideas and bring them forward while maintaining the rhythm and sound of the musicians.
Outcomes over output.
My focus is on driving real, measurable outcomes that align with the organization’s goals. Every action, every decision, should contribute to tangible, understandable results that demonstrate progress. Every output needs to be in service to the outcomes, not to just chasing solutions to problems that may not exist.
Hold strong opinions, loosely.
I encourage my team members to form strong opinions based on their expertise and to defend those opinions vigorously. However, I also expect them to hold these opinions loosely because new information, insights, and circumstances can shift perspectives. Adaptability is key.
Be better today than you were yesterday.
I want my team members to believe that they can be better today than they were yesterday. I want them to feel ownership over their work and to see themselves as active participants in shaping both the product and the organization’s future. And that only comes when you have a growth mindset and bulldog determination for doing it better.
It's good enough for now; we're iterating.
While I want my team members to push themselves and their work, I also want them to know when to stop and let things be. Iteration and feedback are what sharpen great designs. You'll always find problems that haunt you; learning to let go and accepting imperfect is a paramount skill in product design.