Approach

Opinions I've paid for

Six rules for deciding, each one a tie-breaker. Speed against completeness, the problem with a budget against the problem with none. This is what you would actually be hiring.

  1. Evidence

    Behavior outranks testimony

    When what people say conflicts with what they do, believe the doing. When the cause can’t be measured, measure the behavior it produces.

    Everyone said it was easy Gated

  2. Sequencing

    Never ship the promise before the machinery that keeps it

    The visible half waits for the load-bearing half, even when the visible half is the demo.

    None of it is interface work Gated

  3. Adoption

    Anchor new structure in trust that already exists

    New frameworks ride on inherited vocabulary, existing habits, and the systems of record people already believe.

    Beat the spreadsheet or lose Gated

  4. Focus

    If it doesn’t change a decision, it’s decoration

    Every artifact, study, segment, and metric earns its place by the decision it moves.

    Decision-shaped, not poster-shaped Gated

  5. Governance

    Publish the criteria, not the verdict

    When you’re about to make the call, encode the call instead.

    Seven categories, and the rule that placed the eighth Gated

  6. Ownership

    The failure nobody owns comes first

    When two problems compete for you, the one without an owner wins, because the owned one already has a team.

    A hold nobody owned, sized from the behavior it produced Gated

Every receipt above opens a case study, and the cases are password-protected because the numbers inside them are internal. The password is on my résumé, or ask and you'll have it in a message.

Underneath all six: be honest, kind, and curious. Honest because the person who tells you the study went against us is the only one whose good news means anything. Kind because a room that expects contempt stops offering the half-formed idea that turns out to be the answer. Curious because the fastest route to a better answer is wanting the other discipline's version of the problem more than you want your own to survive.

Methods

What that looks like in practice

Service mapping
Journeys across products, channels, and org boundaries — including the parts nobody owns.
Design operating models
The governance that outlives the meeting: placement criteria written down, taxonomy and naming rules agreed before anyone is asked to use them, shared libraries with an owner and a changelog, and the decision rules published so the next case routes through the criteria instead of through me.
Information architecture
Open and closed card sorting, tree testing, findability baselines, governance criteria.
Customer models
Behaviorally-grounded archetypes tied to tracked metrics, not persona posters.
Workshop facilitation
Framing and alignment sessions where the people who build it get their fingerprints on it first.
Framework rollout
Roadshows to the teams who would own it, a worked example built in their own domain, and the shared vocabulary written down before anyone is asked to use it.
Prototyping
Paper through interactive — fidelity chosen to answer a specific question, never to impress.
Mixed-methods research
Qualitative depth, quantitative confidence, and ML-assisted synthesis to close the gap between study and decision.
Tooling I build
Gemini Gems of my own: one that turns a customer type into that type’s story, one that turns the story into storyboard images, one that pairs a failure with the number attached to it, and one that reads meeting notes into a deck so I arrive at the next session current on the last.

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The principles are only interesting if they produced something. See the work →

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