Designer, Creator, Maker
I love building products, teams, and partnerships that drive business impact through human-centered design. Over 20+ years I've learned to manage change & navigate ambiguity at every scale. I have built high-performing design teams, and elevated design literacy, at the enterprise level. As a founder and startup veteran, I bring an entrepreneurial spirit to every initiative.
Most recently I led Enterprise Experience Design at 
for our streaming services Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, and STAR+. Previously I led Growth Design, UX Research, and Sports Products.
Recent Highlights
- 2023 – Built & managed a program for Enterprise Tools at Disney, saving $100M/pa in operating costs.
- 2022 – Co-authored the designer career framework, hiring playbook, and performance tools for Disney.
- 2021 – Led product design for STAR+, Disney's general entertainment service in Latin America.
- 2020 – Led the design of Disney+ GroupWatch, a social viewing feature.
- 2019 – Launched Growth Design for Disney+ & ESPN+ growing them from 0-126M subscribers in two years.
- 2018 – Scaled a design team at MLB from 2 - 26 people including UX Research, Growth, Sports, and Enterprise.
- 2016 – Led the design of 6 different streaming services for MLB Advanced Media, growing that business toward a $4B exit.
- 2015 – Built a podcast platform that paid creators a fair commission at BlogTalkRadio / Voxnest leading to a $55M acquisition by iHeartMedia.
Design Leadership
There are many amazing frameworks for design leadership published to learn from: Four quadrants, Ikigai People Management, Five Ps, Servant Leadership Theory... I don't want to just reframe the great work that has been shared already. My addition to the conversation is sharing some lessons from nature that have inspired and informed my approach to design leadership.
Killer Whale (orcinus orca) leadership is heavily dependent on strong mentorship and collaboration. Orca pods are matriarchal, governed by the eldest and wisest female of the family. These matriarchs spend a lot of their time teaching younger orcas about hunting, communication, collaboration, and sharing. Many Orcas practice strong cross-functional collaboration when they link up different pods into "super-pods" to hunt large game.
Lions (panthera leo) lead their pride by providing security and [psychological] safety. Male lions protect their family from predators, and their hunting grounds from poaching. Contrary to the myth of male lions being lazy because they hunt far less than females, they must fight continually and vigorously for the security of their team.
Honeybees (apis mellifera) provide a lesson in distributed decision-making. Bee collaboration depends on clear roles & responsibilities distributed across the entire swarm. Fun fact: honeybees rotate through different jobs – from nurse to cleaner to forward guard – throughout their lives. The queen bee isn't giving them directions but rather each successive generation learns from its ancestors.
Tenets for Good Design
- "Ask, don't assume."
- "Directing is 90% Casting."
- "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
- "Momentum is more valuable than analysis."
The Design Process Is Storytelling
Good product design is good storytelling. I believe in using story structure as a rubric for evaluating design work.
There are many wonderful design frameworks to help define a process. Each of them helps designers navigate from ambiguity to clarity. There are more similarities than differences between them.
Using these frameworks has always left me a little lost at the critical moments in the process. How do you provide continuity across phases of a project? How do you evalauate progress? What is the exit criteria at each step? The frameworks taught in Design schools don't equip designers who are leading cross functional teams the tools they need to drive alignment at these inflection points.
The design process - just like a good story - depends on character development, conflict, and resolution. We need to understand our users (characters), frame their problems with evidence (development), ideate broadly on solutions (conflict), and prove those solutions through testing (resolution).
As a design leader, I focus on bringing together the right people at these inflection points to collaborate on making sure the narrative of the design makes sense. If the story makes sense, the design invariably follows.