I'm a Design Leader helping teams shape strategy and scale impact.
Enterprise impact
Led frameworks at Cisco scaling across 200+ teammates, reducing onboarding time by 66%
Product outcomes
Drove ~10% adoption increase for Duo Mobile as Trusted, simplified complex security workflows
Process optimization
Redesigned complex application process, reducing steps 62% for talent platform
Cross-functional leadership
Mentored designers while building bridges between design, engineering, and product to align on shared outcomes
Notable experience
ABOUT ME
I found design through music and making.
My journey started as a creative kid who chose "graphic designer" over "starving painter" in college. After freelancing in Boston—designing websites, record layouts, and merch for bands and indie labels—I moved to Austin and landed at frog design, where UX pulled me in completely. Since then, I've worked across agencies, startups, and enterprise teams, learning how design adapts to different scales and constraints.
My approach is grounded in mindfulness and humility.
This approach is shaped by my daily meditation practice. It keeps me grounded under pressure, helps me collaborate with stakeholders thoughtfully, and maintains a learner's mindset that's essential when mentoring other designers or challenging assumptions.
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I focus on systems thinking and team development.
​Great design happens when teams feel psychologically safe to explore and iterate, and when teams can see the bigger picture—how user needs, business goals, and technical realities interconnect.
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Research and data sharpen my instincts.
While I trust my design intuition after 10+ years, that experience is most valuable when paired with user voices. I leverage both qualitative research and quantitative data to validate assumptions, uncover blind spots, and ensure solutions actually work for the people using them.
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Design is just one way I show up in the world.
Work aside, I'm a punk rock bassist, chess player, and Marine Corps Reserve veteran. I stay involved in my local music scene, I draw and write music for the fun of it, and I volunteer with a support group for people in addiction recovery. Whether I'm creating products, offering feedback, or supporting my community, I do it with intention
Brief thoughts on design and...
Social good
Our livelihoods should be connected to improving social conditions, not just paying the bills. There's value in the Buddhist concept of "wise livelihood"—ensuring our work does no harm and actually benefits others. As a designer I believe I have a responsibility to consider the broader effects beyond business metrics: accessibility, furthering a noble mission, and advocating for users that might otherwise be overlooked.
I can't save the world, but I can focus on what's within my control: using my critical thinking, design, and organizational skills to positively impact the communities around me.
Creative landfill
Designers should avoid "Creative Landfill"—both the literal waste of disposable products and the figurative waste of design that doesn't solve real problems or create lasting value. I propose a framework for building "Forever Products" that are personal, valuable, emotional, and timeless, using principles that help designers create work with enduring impact rather than contributing to throwaway culture.
Read more on the argodesign blog
Education
I'm surrounded by friends who are educators and parents, and if we're being honest about the future of humankind, it starts with how we educate children and prepare them for a world that's shifting at speed—socially and technologically—far faster than anything I experienced growing up. The reality is that educators are increasingly doing more with less, especially in public schools where resources are stretched thin. If I can take what I know about design, AI, and technology and apply it toward supporting this underserved but hugely important sector, then I consider that a meaningful win.
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Areas where I see design having effect: educator enablement—designing tools that reduce toil so teachers can focus on teaching; adaptive learning interfaces—tailoring content to individual student needs and learning styles; and parent engagement—creating thoughtful resources that help parents actively support their children's journey.
AI Ethics
We're designing tomorrow's digital divide today, as AI becomes tablestakes for participating in society. When it inevitably becomes essential for job applications, homework help, or navigating government services, having a device that can't effectively run AI becomes a form of digital redlining. We're establishing these access patterns right now, and once systems are entrenched, retrofitting equity becomes nearly impossible.
Unlike previous digital divides that emerged gradually, AI accessibility is being designed in real-time by a small number of companies making technical decisions. These choices aren't made in a vacuum—they're infrastructure decisions about who gets to participate in an AI-enabled society.
The patterns of access being established today will determine whether AI amplifies existing inequalities or creates new avenues for participation. We can't design our way out of capitalism, but we can design systems that work across economic disparities. This means building AI that gracefully degrades across devices and prioritizing offline capabilities, ensuring it remains accessible all the way from high-income US households to villages in the Global South.
Currently reading/pondering...
Behaviorial design, public speaking, crucial conversations.
ADDITIONAL THINKING
The empathy lesson I received in rural Zambia
In 2010, frog design partnered with UNICEF on Project Mwana, a groundbreaking mHealth initiative aimed at improving maternal and infant health in rural Zambia and peri-urban Malawi. The project's goal was ambitious yet clear: leverage mobile technology to significantly increase mothers' visits to clinics for critical ante and postnatal care in regions where mobile phones were often the only reliable communication infrastructure.
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As part of frog's pro-bono commitment to this life-saving work, I traveled to Zambia with two colleagues to conduct user research and design mobile systems that could deliver essential health information—clinic locations, service availability, test results, and care reminders—directly to the mothers who needed it most.
Prior to visiting Zambia, I thought I had a decent handle on empathy—at least the textbook version we talk about as designers when we empathize with our users. But seeing the world with dust on my shoes, walking from town to village, taught me the difference between intellectual understanding and genuine perspective.
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Transportation became one of my biggest eye-openers. Back home, I owned two bikes that I used for recreation and convenience. In rural Zambia, a bicycle is a luxury that can mean the difference between a 10km walk or ride—and the majority of people walk everywhere, often covering distances we'd consider too far to bother with. Walking from home to farm might be 8km one way, roughly an hour and a half. Some villages are 50km from the nearest health clinic. What I saw as recreation, they experienced as the difference between accessibility and isolation.
I returned with a fundamentally different understanding of privilege and need. The readily available technology, electricity, and water (that I didn't have to carry) suddenly felt less like normal life and more like abundance. This shift from "book smart" empathy to lived perspective changed how I approach design—not just understanding users intellectually, but genuinely grappling with the gap between my assumptions and their reality.
All Zambia photos were taken in the field by me or by one of my two colleagues.