About
I live in New Jersey and cook most nights.
The work is on the other pages, and it argues for itself there. This one is the rest of it: where I am, what I run, what I have written, and one recipe I would actually defend.
I build and lead design teams that make fragmented services behave like one, and I put AI to work inside the practice with evidence rather than enthusiasm. I also run Viable Brand (opens in a new tab), a company dedicated to examining the intersection of UX and how businesses use research.
Straight answers
The questions you are actually asking
Your title says Lead, not Director. Have you managed?
I built and manage a team of four designers — Yasmeen, Araida, Noopur, and Latricia — and have kept it through three different mandates inside Verizon’s service design group, Experience Architecture — Navigation Architecture, then Identity Architecture, then Ecosystem. When the work moved, the people came with me: the same designers are named on the team diagrams in three separate case studies here, two years apart, so that is a claim you can check rather than one you have to take. I also managed Publicis Sapient on the Home app build — their work and their deliverables, not just the relationship. The title was Lead Experience Designer II; the job was managing: hiring, 1:1s, career progression, and annual reviews for my own reports, and accountability for a ten-person partner delivery team. Look at the mandates: fix one surface, build the model everyone shares, then build the thing that lets other teams do it without me. Before Verizon I started three companies and sold one — Hip Pocket, founded 2013, sold 2015 — and I still run Viable Brand. Owning work nobody assigned me is not new.
What have you actually done with AI?
Four things with numbers on them. I benchmarked sixteen published prompt frameworks against 169 real participants before choosing the one our synthetic users run on. I shipped three evaluative agents, grounded in six customer-insight studies, so product teams run a first-pass card sort or tree test before anyone recruits a study. I sized an uncounted workflow leak, wrote the functional logic for an AI verification step, and it was validated across 231 live accounts. And I built four tools for my own team: note-to-brief synthesis, story-to-storyboard generation, executive recap decks, and root-cause failure sizing. Since 2025 every project of mine runs the same way: decks built from the meeting notes, current-state and future-state storyboards drawn from the customer story, and initial tests with synthetic users to scope the research before the insights team is engaged.
What did you leave behind?
Frameworks other people now run. A cross-org Customer Types framework — psychographics, accessibility, life stages — adopted by product, strategy, and design across 164M connections. A measurement framework for global navigation, with a findability baseline and the taxonomy criteria written down, evaluated across 425 participants. Two unbudgeted service breakdowns nobody owned, steered into funded, production-grade business cases. And four consumer entry points converged onto one shared design system, with a ten-person partner team delivering against it. Each one is a case study here.
You have an associate’s degree.
In graphic design, from Southeast Community College in Milford, Nebraska. It taught me that the composition is the argument, which works on a service blueprint about as well as it works on a poster. Everything after that I learned by being handed a mess and being the one responsible for it.
What do you want next?
A director or principal mandate over a whole service, not one surface of it. I am most useful before the roadmap is set, and I stay useful through shipping. I work remote or hybrid.
- Where I am
- Bridgewater, New Jersey, with my wife Courtney, our daughter and our cats. Before that Louisville, Kentucky; Dallas, Texas; and Nebraska, where I studied graphic design at Southeast Community College in Milford.
- Most evenings
- Cooking dinner for my family, working on a side hustle, or playing an online co-op game with friends.
- First job
- Out of college in 1998, designing the icons on pickle cards — the pull-tab lottery tickets sold across Nebraska.
- Otherwise
- I enjoy going to Yankee games and often end up at a Mets game instead, because my friend has the season tickets. Also traveling abroad, and techno. The best week of the last few years was Isla Mujeres, off Cancún.
If you are ever cooking for me
Roasted sweet potatoes with rosemary and smoked paprika
- Sweet potatoes
- 4 large
- Rosemary
- 1 tbsp
- Olive oil
- 2 tbsp
- Smoked paprika
- 1 tbsp
- Kosher salt
- 1 tsp
- Fresh pepper
- 1 tsp
- Heat the oven to 425°F. Rinse and quarter the sweet potatoes, and mince the rosemary.
- In a large bowl combine the potatoes, rosemary, salt, pepper and smoked paprika. Drizzle the oil over everything and toss, or mix with your hands.
- Roast, turning occasionally, until soft at the center and starting to crisp at the edges — about 30 to 40 minutes.
Writing
What I think about it
-
Guidance for IA in UX design
Information Architecture is often not considered a relevant discipline when designing an experience. Whether you realize it or not, you are doing it.
What I read
Books
- Jobs to Be Done
- What Customers Crave
Blogs
Where I turn up
The Information Architecture Conference in Philadelphia, every year.
UXDX Community New York · User Experience HQ · The Product Group · Design Driven NYC · Creative Connection · Domain Mark
Reference
- Practice
- Founded
- Hip Pocket, founded 2013 and sold in 2015. Co-founder of Art Move, an art magazine distributed across five midwestern states, and Art & Soul Beads, an educational startup.
- Education
- Southeast Community College, Milford, Nebraska. Associate of Applied Science, Graphic Design.
- Recognition
- American Advertising Award, 2014. American Advertising Federation, Nebraska Chapter, for Artmove Magazine.