The most meaningful way to move a business forward is to unlock the humans inside it.

Shaping moment

Joining the conversation.

This is the year I finally feel ready to join the conversation shaping the UX design industry. I’ve started giving talks and kicked off my Substack, Designing Discernment.

Shaping moment

Choosing management, on purpose.

Management first found me by accident. At WHOOP, I got one of those “Surprise, you’re a manager now!” promotions when the team around me was laid off.

So when I started my next job search, I assumed I’d return to a Staff role. Instead, interviewing clarified something I hadn’t fully admitted to myself: the opportunities I was most excited about were the ones where I could lead people, shape the conditions around the work, and help a team get better together.

That was when management became a choice, not a circumstance.

Shaping moment

Becoming a user of my own work.

WHOOP was the first time I worked on a product that was already part of my own life. I cared about fitness, health, and the questions the product was trying to answer, which made the work feel unusually personal.

It also made me uneasy. I had spent years hearing some version of “you are not your user,” and suddenly I was one. I had to learn that caring deeply about the product didn’t make me less rigorous. The real discipline was knowing when my own experience was useful—and when to get out of its way.

Holding that tension changed how I design, where my own experience can sharpen the questions I ask, but it can’t answer them for everyone.

Shaping moment

Finding my confidence in rooms that spoke design.

IBM is where I started to find my confidence as a design leader. Practiced frameworks turned me into a design thinking facilitator, and weaving Watson AI into talent and HR software gave me the most human-centered problems I’ve solved to date. It also showed me what a truly scaled, human-centered organization behaves like: I could walk into any room and everyone recognized design thinking.

Shaping moment

Designing for people who read data for a living.

I became the founding designer on an MVP that’s still sold today, partly because more senior designers weren’t convinced it would go anywhere. Cloud analytics for on-premise storage sounded like too many things at once, and the engineering team had a reputation for being difficult.

They weren’t difficult. They were deeply analytical people who couldn’t see themselves in research that disappeared for a quarter and returned with an answer. They were building for the cloud and needed to learn at cloud speed.

Working with them taught me to stop treating research as a ceremony. Evidence only changes the work when the people making decisions can participate in it, understand it, and use it while the decision is still alive.

Shaping moment

Three weeks in, I quit.

My first job out of school was at an agency in downtown Boston: long hours, and every project ripped apart until I no longer recognized the design I was handing to clients. It made me so insecure that I knew it wasn’t the right environment for me. Making $40K, I took a leap, quit, and called about an offer I had walked away from. Fortunately, three weeks later, it was still available.