I lead the teams that build great design systems.I lead the teams that build great design systems.I lead the teams that build great design systems.
I build the scaffolding designers actually need to do good work — processes that hold up, tools people will use without a fight, and enough shared standard that teams stop reinventing the same decisions.
I'm a designer by trade who started fixing stuff on the side because I'm the kind of person who can't leave a broken process alone. It worked well enough that I was able to turn it into my full-time focus.
HOW I LEAD
Own the call
Some calls have to be made without the resourcing to do them the “right” way. Make the call, and if it doesn't fully pan out, own that instead of rewriting the story.
Coach the approach
Reviewing someone's output after the fact teaches them what you wanted. Setting the approach with them up front teaches them how to think — the version that outlasts you.
Earn trust, don't police it
Rules assume everyone's looking for a shortcut. A system that's earned trust puts the burden on the builder to justify the exception, not on itself to catch everyone in advance.
Data over feelings
Confidence isn't where you start, it's what's left after the research holds up. When the data doesn't back an opinion yet, the honest answer is “let me get back to you.”
Protect your people
When someone's work is being undermined, say something directly first. If that doesn't fix it, escalate — quietly, and all the way up if that's what it takes.
WHAT I'M GOOD AT
Funding a system without formal authority
Southwest's design system ran on borrowed time for years before it had a real budget — built by pitching every stakeholder in whatever language actually moved them: cost, time, consistency.
Turning disruption into forward motion
A pandemic canceled a funded initiative overnight. A company-wide layoff, years later, reshuffled leadership above me. Both times, I used the opening the disruption created instead of just surviving it.
Scaling adoption without a mandate
Grew Southwest's design tooling from about 100 seats to 2,706 — including departments outside my own org that I onboarded anyway, with no authority to prioritize their requests, because they wanted in.
Making (and unmaking) high-stakes vendor calls
Built a nine-month case for a $150K/year vendor, then found the opening to walk away when internal momentum had stalled and the spend was becoming a bigger barrier than the problem it was solving — and separately pushed for better enterprise contract terms as our other tooling scaled past 2,700 seats.
OUTSIDE OF WORK
Outside of work, most of my time goes to my family, cooking, and video games I'm probably too invested in. I'm a genuine film and TV nerd, less about the story on screen and more about how it got there, since the craft decisions behind the scenes interest me as much as the finished product.
That behind-the-scenes curiosity isn't new. I got my hands on Flash in ninth grade and started making my own cel animations, and later took photography and videography classes in college. Long before "systems thinker" was a job title, I was already the kid who wanted to understand how something got made, not just watch it happen. That's still basically what I do for a living.
Also trying to get back outdoors more: hiking, walking, easing back into biking, for the roughly five months a year Texas isn't doing its best impression of a convection oven.
EXPERTISE
