About Me

I’m a design leader and educator focused on building great products, growing great teams, and transforming how organizations work.

For more than 20 years, I’ve led design teams and organizations across education, AI, enterprise software, healthcare, and consumer technology. My career has taken me from startups to some of the world’s best-known brands, giving me the opportunity to tackle complex challenges, lead through change, and design for millions of people.

The common thread throughout my career has been transformation and scale. I enjoy taking on organizations, products, and problems with the potential to become something better. That has meant building and evolving design teams, developing leaders, establishing design systems, and creating the processes and shared practices that allow great design to scale across complex organizations.

I believe the best design organizations combine high expectations with high trust. My role isn’t to tell talented designers how to solve every problem. It’s to clarify where we’re going and why, give people the autonomy to bring their expertise and creativity to the work, and provide the coaching and feedback they need to grow.

That autonomy works best when strong collaboration supports it. I’m continually looking for ways to remove friction between Design, Product, Engineering, Research, and other partners, creating systems that help teams share earlier, make decisions faster, and spend more of their energy solving problems for customers. Design systems follow that same philosophy: build the shared foundation once so teams can move faster, stay consistent, and focus their creativity where it matters most.

Today, I’m particularly interested in how AI is changing both the products we design and the way we design them. I’ve helped bring AI-powered experiences to products at Grammarly and Savvas, and as an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University, I explore these changes with the next generation of designers, including how we can use AI to amplify human creativity rather than diminish it.

Of course, work is only part of my story.

Family is at the heart of who I am. I’m the proud father of two teenagers with very different passions, from basketball and entrepreneurship to music and aviation. More than anything, I love that they embody empathy and community, and are eager to stand up and create a world that is kinder and fairer for everyone. My days coaching park district basketball are behind me (and I suspect the referees are grateful), but helping people recognize and develop their potential remains one of the most rewarding things I do.

Music has also been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I’m a musician and songwriter and have had the opportunity to collaborate with other musicians and create music that has reached listeners around the world. I love learning about the journeys of my favorite musicians across genres. The same themes emerge again and again: mentors matter, collaboration is essential, inspiration should be constantly sought, and greatness requires both hard work and the resilience to push through failure.

I’m endlessly curious. I read too much news, watch too many documentaries, and am continually trying to understand how technology, culture, history, and people shape the world around us.

I’m quite fortunate to have found my way to being a design leader, a career that brings together so much of what matters to me: curiosity, creativity, collaboration, continuous learning, and helping people and ideas reach their potential.