Design leadership
for the AI era.
I work with product teams building AI — designing the assistants, agents, and interfaces, and making sure the design system can keep up with all of it.
Most AI products ship before the design thinking has caught up.
That's not a knock — it's just how development works when you're moving fast. But AI products are different. The trust you lose in version one is hard to earn back, and the UX decisions baked in early are the hardest to unwind later.
- Conversation flows nobody actually tested with users
- AI responses that confuse instead of help
- No clear pattern for when the AI is wrong or uncertain
- A design system that's already two sprints behind
- User research that never makes it to the people making decisions
None of these are hard to fix individually. The issue is that without someone whose job it is to hold all of it together, they compound.
A design audit of
a typical AI product.
I run versions of this with almost every new team I work with. The issues change, but the shape of the problem tends to look pretty similar.
Where I spend
my time.
I work across strategy, systems, and the actual design work — whatever the team needs most. This is where that usually lands.
AI Assistant Design
Conversation flows, intent recognition, graceful failure, and the subtle art of calibrating expectations with AI-powered interfaces.
Agent UX & Tool Interfaces
Designing for agentic systems — tool use, multi-step tasks, progress visibility, and keeping humans appropriately in the loop.
Trust & Transparency
Patterns that build user confidence: appropriate disclosure, uncertainty communication, and recoverable errors in AI systems.
Design Systems
Component libraries and tokens that scale with the product — enabling consistent AI experiences across surfaces and teams.
User Research & Testing
Embedding research into AI product cycles — understanding how people interact with AI, what they trust, and where they get lost.
Design Org Leadership
Vision, principles, hiring, and roadmaps that align cross-functional teams and give design a real seat at the table.
"I set direction and then stay involved until it's built right."
15+ years designing at startups, scale-ups, and enterprises — from small founding teams to platforms at scale.
Most design leaders pick a lane — either vision or execution. I've always done both, because neither works without the other. Setting a direction nobody builds is just a document. Executing without a direction is just churn.
When I work with a team, I'm in your sprint cycles, your design reviews, your conversations with engineering. I'm not an advisor who shows up to give notes. I'm doing the work alongside you.
- Design vision & principles
- Product roadmap influence
- Design org structure & hiring
- Research strategy
- Cross-functional alignment
- Design systems architecture
- Engineering collaboration
- Prototyping & validation
- AI interaction patterns
- Implementation oversight
Three ways
to bring me in.
Most teams don't need a full-time design executive. They need the right senior judgment at the right moments. Here's how that usually works.
Strategic oversight, weekly
Weekly sessions to review direction, unblock decisions, and keep quality high. Good fit for teams that have designers but need a senior voice on the bigger calls.
- Weekly 60-min strategy sessions
- Async design reviews & feedback
- Quarterly roadmap alignment
- On-call decision support
Part-time design principal
Two to three days a week, working alongside your team in sprints, reviews, and architecture discussions. I set direction and do the work — not just advise from the outside.
- 2–3 days per week, fully embedded
- Sprint planning & design execution
- Engineering collaboration & handoffs
- Design system ownership
- Team mentorship & development
Scoped project work
A defined engagement around one specific thing — launching an AI feature, auditing your current product, building out a design system, or getting your team's AI design practice off the ground.
- Defined scope & deliverables
- Discovery → design → handoff
- AI audit & recommendations
- Workshop facilitation
Not sure which fits? Send me a note. Most engagements start with a conversation about where the team is and what's actually getting in the way.