How I lead design

In 2014 I founded Designation, a four-person software studio with three developers. Over five years we served 40 clients across insurance finance, ophthalmology, trucking, industrial automation, and local retail.

• I owned the whole practice: research, design, development oversight, sales, account management, and project management. That taught me how design decisions land in budgets, contracts, and code.
• I built systems early. For Myi, I made the core unit of the product the foundation of an atomic design system, which let a small team ship across 120+ facilities and 38,000 users.
• I learned to protect the team. When our full-stack engineer left mid-project, I took on his work and renegotiated scope, timeline, and budget with the client. Since then I set scope and working boundaries at the start, so a team can sustain its best work.

At Comcast I led UX and information architecture for P2 Sphere, the platform that tracks $3B+ in network construction and now serves more than 115,000 people.

• I grew the function. I was the sole designer for three years, then mentored three designers as the team grew.
• I put research at the start of every feature: 5–10 shadowing sessions and interviews per feature, across three divisions and headquarters.
• I influenced technical direction. Three months into the build, I persuaded leadership to move from Angular to React with Material UI. That cut build time and cost, and it made a shared design system possible.
• I worked at the executive level: 60+ senior leaders across three divisions, with live demos for finance leadership before each major change.

Quality slipped most often between an approved design and the shipped screen, so I built habits that closed that gap.

• A standing design QA ritual. A QA developer, the product owner, the project manager, and a rotating front-end developer set aside time every sprint to fix differences between what shipped and what was approved.
• Workshops for developers and QA, and a seat in sprint planning, so design priorities shaped the work before it was built.
• One token-based design system shared by three applications and one brand across the network products.

Much of design leadership is helping people trust a change. When Comcast introduced AI-predicted completion dates to a finance team that was wary of AI, I designed the interface to show what drove each prediction and published a plain-language guide to how the model worked. The finance team went on to adopt the tool and advocate for it.

When a permitting tool launched badly, I worked directly with its harshest critics. A service map of how permitting really ran on paper turned a fight about software into a shared picture of the work, and many critics became contributors. NPS moved from −32 to +32.

On Vox, users were hesitant to post at first. Working with QA, I made sure every post got a thoughtful reply, and the forum grew into a community where colleagues answered each other's questions.

I also use AI in my own practice, and I've written about where it helps and where it doesn't.

A full case study of the token-based design system behind Sphere, covering tokens, components, governance, and how I'm now rebuilding it with an AI agent, is on its way once it's cleared to share publicly.

I've served on a community rec center board, run a pickleball clinic for players in their 70s and older, and guided groups as a sea kayak guide and lead medic. Leading a group through conditions you can't control and leading a team through a hard launch call for many of the same skills. More about me.