My approach to building teams, shaping strategy, and creating experiences that help people succeed.
I'm a UX leader who builds teams, shapes strategy, and delivers experiences that work. Currently Director of UX Research at Bounteous and Adjunct Faculty at DePaul University's College of Digital Media.
Over 15 years, I've led research and design for enterprise clients across healthcare, finance, energy, retail, and travel. I've built teams from 10 to 40 people, managed multimillion-dollar client engagements, and taught hundreds of practitioners who now work at companies like Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.
We never stop learning. We are the voice of our users in every meeting, every decision, every tradeoff. Our purpose is to design experiences that help people achieve their goals—not just complete tasks, but succeed.
That means listening deeply, advocating fiercely, and building teams where everyone feels empowered to challenge assumptions and push for better.
The moment we think we understand our users is the moment we stop serving them well. I foster teams that question assumptions, seek disconfirming evidence, and treat every project as an opportunity to learn something new.
In roadmap discussions, sprint planning, and executive reviews, someone needs to advocate for the people using the product. That's us. I teach my teams to bring user evidence to every conversation and translate insights into language stakeholders can act on.
I lead with transparency—sharing context, admitting uncertainty, and creating space for dissent. The best ideas rarely come from the most senior person in the room. My job is to create conditions where good ideas can emerge from anywhere.
Perfect is the enemy of good. I push teams to get work in front of users early and often, to treat launches as learning opportunities, and to build feedback loops that let us continuously improve.
Weekly check-ins focused on three questions: What's going well? What's not? What feels off but you can't quite name? I track wins, losses, and patterns over time to help people see their own growth.
Direct and contextual. I name the specific behavior, explore the context together, and collaborate on next steps. Is this a pattern or a one-off? What circumstances contributed? What would you do differently?
I look for storytellers—people who can walk me through their design decisions, explain the branches they pruned and why, articulate tradeoffs, and show me how they think, not just what they made.
I share the raw materials, not just the polished outputs. Lessons learned sessions, method deep-dives, interesting articles and research. Learning happens when we're honest about what didn't work.
I've taught graduate-level HCI courses at DePaul University since 2017, because I believe it's important to teach the next generation how the actual job works—not just theory, but practice. At the same time, understanding academic foundations and frameworks gives practitioners tools to apply to novel situations. I try to bridge both: industry reality grounded in academic rigor.
Mobile Experience Design
Platform constraints, gesture patterns, responsive thinking, native vs. web tradeoffs.
Social Interaction Design
Designing for human connection, community dynamics, social platform patterns.
Usability Evaluation Methods
Research methods, study design, analysis, communicating findings.
UX Strategy & Analytics
Connecting UX to business outcomes, metrics, organizational influence.
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I'm always interested in conversations about UX leadership, team building, and creating better experiences.
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