My Leadership Approach.

I focus on building a foundation of trust amongst my team members and cross-functional partners. We establish trust by developing product-domain knowledge and consistently bringing value to our collaboration. I invest early in shared context so designers know I understand their constraints and can advocate for their work with credibility.

A culture of psychological safety is essential for my team to try, learn, and iterate together.

Leading by example, I emphasize regular, transparent communication — seeking and responding to feedback, and making it normal to say "I don't know yet" in front of the room.

With trust, I can empower my team with a high level of autonomy in their areas of responsibility. I ensure designers have clarity on their scope of responsibility and know when alignment or escalation is expected — they own the work.

I provide coaching and mentoring to help them grow as designers and grow in their careers, stepping in to work hands-on, shoulder-to-shoulder with team members as needed on strategic projects.

I work to ensure that disagreement, uncertainty, and mistakes are treated as part of the work — not personal failures — so designers feel safe to challenge ideas, take risks, and ask for help early.

With high autonomy, I expect high accountability from each team member — and myself. Designers use their judgment and expertise to manage projects, escalating when in need of additional support or prioritization guidance.

We review outcomes relative to predefined goals, constraints, and a shared definition of design quality — not to assign blame, but to sharpen judgment and improve future results. When team members fall short of expectations, we identify the gap and create a plan for improvement.

I've applied this approach with multiple teams to ship and scale the experience for multiple products, growing business impact through improved user outcomes and increased revenue.

With the introduction of generative AI, the software development lifecycle is rapidly changing. The roles of design, product management, and engineering are evolving. Design teams must adapt to this moment — growing new skills and continuing to create value by helping teams build the right things that empower our users.

Execution is suddenly cheap, which makes it easy for teams to speed off in the wrong direction faster.

Our user-centered fundamentals, rooted in customer needs, are key to creating a unified experience instead of a combination of bolted-on, vibe-coded features. As a leader, upskilling my team members to leverage generative AI tools in their production workflows has been key to our success.

My designers partner with engineering to set up our products locally, make pull requests with Cursor, Claude, and similar tools, and see their work go directly to production. We work in coded prototypes that reflect our design system and can be quickly integrated into production environments. We experiment with new tools and models, and regularly share learnings to lift each other.