Product & Design Leadership
You’re shipping faster. But are you building better?
Your AI-powered teams are generating more output than ever. Engineers are prototyping features. PMs are mocking up flows. Things are shipping. But the product is starting to drift — features that work alone but don’t add up, interaction patterns nobody chose on purpose, and a roadmap that’s getting harder to defend.
The speed is real. The direction isn’t.
How I help
Leadership
Elevating the craft and impact of design by establishing vision, fostering talent, instilling a product thinking mindset, while integrating design into the core business strategy.
Operations
Everything from running research end-to-end, stand up research and prototyping practices, integrating AI, to building a research practice and team.
Research
Improve the flow and effectiveness of design, by strengthening cross-functional relations and flow, integrating AI, bolstering design systems, and generally refining the design operating model.
Key offer:
Clarity Reset
The fastest way to fix a drifting product isn't more design. It's a decision.
The Clarity Reset is a short, executive-level engagement with one job: get your leadership aligned on what you're actually building, and why. We find the real problem underneath the one everyone's been arguing about, and you leave with a direction product, design, and engineering can each defend without flinching.
Time-boxed — usually two to three weeks. You walk out with the problem named, the direction set, and the hard calls made out loud instead of deferred.
Ways of Working
Not every situation needs the full reset. The goal is always the same: see the situation clearly, help teams find their mojo and move forward with confidence. Some options:
Embedded leadership. I step in as your fractional design leader, a day or two a week, to hold direction and quality while your team scales, restructures, or searches for a permanent hire. Senior judgment without a full-time line on the budget.
A working session. One focused workshop to find where the product is fragmenting and where the real opportunities are — including where AI is helping and where it's quietly making things worse.
Research that decides something. Targeted UX research run end-to-end, plus training your team to run it themselves. Not research for a deck — research that settles an argument and moves the roadmap.
If you want to find a way to work together, contact me.
When I'm in, these stop being your problem:
whether the product hangs together as one thing or three
design quality, and the standard the team holds itself to
how design, product, and engineering actually make decisions together
the design system and research practice — built to run without me
Those I own outright. I'll also push hard on product strategy, roadmap, and brand — I won't make those calls for you, but I'll make sure they get made with clear eyes.
Where I’ve done it
As the former Vice President of Design at QuillBot and Head of Design at Zocdoc, I have a proven track record of scaling design organizations through critical inflection points. My career spans strategic leadership roles at frog and Smart Design, with deep expertise in consumer tech, financial service, internet of things, healthcare, marketplaces, and AI-driven platforms. Beyond practice, I have contributed to the next generation of designers as a faculty member in SVA’s MFA Product Design program.
I’ve led through growth, lean times, business model transformations, acquisitions, and an epidemic. I thrive in ambiguity and strive to create teams who are just as comfortable with change and uncertainty — after all, that’s the ground beneath us these days.
AI is not a design strategy. It’s a material and tool — powerful and fast, and it will absolutely help your team do more. But it doesn’t know what’s worth building. It can’t tell you which problem to solve next, or that your product is held together with good intentions.
The companies that win this era aren’t the ones shipping the most AI-generated screens. They’re the ones with the judgment to know what to build, the systems to keep it coherent, and the leadership to make the hard calls when speed and quality pull in opposite directions.
That’s the work I do.
How I think about this work
Contact me
Interested in working together? Fill out some info and I’ll be in touch right away.