BACKGROUND & APPROACH
Design leadership for complex, high-stakes systems
The short version
I'm a design director with 25+ years of experience, most recently leading design across PayPal's most critical consumer surfaces. I build cross-surface frameworks, stabilize design orgs during leadership transitions, and develop designers into strategic contributors.
My work lives at the intersection of systems thinking, regulatory constraint, and organizational complexity. I'm the person you bring in when the scope is large, the org is in motion, and the stakes for getting it wrong are real.
How I think about design leadership
Most design problems that look like UX problems are actually organizational problems. Surfaces are fragmented because teams are fragmented. Experiences feel incoherent because incentives are misaligned.
My job isn't to design features — it's to build the systems, rituals, and shared language that let a design org move with integrity even when priorities shift, leadership turns over, or the platform is constrained by technical debt.
MOST RECENT ROLE
Senior Design Manager
PayPal 2018-2024
SURFACES OWNED
Home
Onboarding & Early Life
Wallet
Financial Snapshot
Ledger & Transaction Detail
Growth
ALSO ATCapital One · Design Manager
Yahoo · Design Manager
Netscape · Principal
Tangible UX · Principal
BASED
San Francisco
“We could teach users to do one more thing, but we couldn’t help them understand the system they were now inside. The experience produced activation without accumulation — users gained behaviors, not understanding.”
What I built at PayPal
At PayPal, I was the design leader for surfaces shown to nearly every consumer on the platform. Home was the company's highest-visibility engagement surface — a coordination challenge as much as a design challenge, with dozens of teams competing for placement.
I built the cross-surface frameworks that connected these experiences into something coherent. During Quantum Leap — a large-scale redesign during leadership transition — I translated C-suite explorations into a scalable, compliant system framework and rebuilt the alignment processes that had broken down.
Before PayPal
I led design for Capital One's Small Business Lending team, running service design blueprinting workshops and design thinking sprints. Before that, I built and ran my own UX consultancy for seven years across fintech, healthcare informatics, SaaS, and e-commerce.
My career started at Netscape in 1998, which gives me an unusual combination: systems instincts from designing at platform scale, and hands-on credibility to earn trust from engineers and ICs alike.
WHAT I BRING
CROSS-SURFACE SYSTEMS
Coherent ecosystems, not isolated features
I connect fragmented product surfaces into systems — from onboarding to first use to long-term engagement — so users experience a platform, not a collection of features.
DESIGN ORG LEADERSHIP
Stability when organizations are in motion
I build the documentation, rituals, and decision frameworks that keep design organizations grounded during leadership transitions, reorgs, and strategic pivots.
EXPERIMENTATION AT SCALE
Disciplined, insight-generating test programs
I establish the review cadences, cross-functional rituals, and experiment libraries that produce real learning — not just metric movement.
REGULATORY DESIGN
Compliance as a design constraint, not a roadblock
Credit disclosures, repayment hierarchy, regional rules, accessibility — I translate statutory requirements into patterns that preserve clarity and still advance the strategy.
TEAM DEVELOPMENT
Capable designers into strategic contributors
I develop designers through structured ownership, targeted coaching, and the psychological safety that lets people take real creative and strategic risk.
TRUST-FIRST GROWTH
Activation that doesn’t compromise the relationship
I’ve pushed back on dark patterns, aggressive notification strategies, and premature product promotion — demonstrating that trust-first approaches perform better long-term.