About

Before I found design, I spent about ten years in banking — fraud and risk roles at Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and City National. A lot of my days were spent helping people through some of their most stressful financial moments: fraud on their accounts, disputes, money that had gone missing. That work taught me to listen closely and to genuinely care about the person on the other end of the line, not just the problem in front of me. When I moved into product design, that stayed with me.

It also gave me a head start on something I believe deeply. People don't struggle with financial products because they can't understand them. They struggle because they don't feel confident enough to act on them. I've watched someone look at a screen that made perfect sense and still walk away. Designing for that confidence — helping people feel capable and in control of their own money — is the work I love most.

One of my favorite projects taught me this the hard way. I led a study with 1,500 participants to test an idea our whole team was excited about: a warning message for clients about to withdraw their retirement savings early. What we found surprised us. Very few people ever reached the warning, and the ones who did rarely changed course. It was a good reminder that you can't rescue a decision at the very end — you have to earn a client's trust much earlier in their journey. That insight reshaped how we thought about retention, and I'm proud of the honest conversations it started.

These days I lead design systems work, and I'm exploring how AI can help close the gap between design and development — turning our Figma designs into clean, reliable code. It's a new and exciting chapter, and it builds on everything the earlier years taught me about what happens after a design ships.

More and more, the work I care about is building the reproducible processes — shared research methods, design systems, the connective tissue between design and engineering — that let a whole team do its best work, not just me. I've come to think good design leadership is mostly that: keeping the research honest and mature, making the path clear, and getting out of people's way so they can move fast on it.

Off the clock

Home is Joshua Tree, California — a little 2.5-acre spot in the high desert that I was able to buy thanks to remote work, and honestly one of the things I'm proudest of. I got here by way of Portland, Oregon, and I'm not trading the sunshine back anytime soon. Most of what matters to me happens away from a screen: my wife and our son, and our three dogs — Ozzy, Lottie, and Jonesy — who are very good at reminding me to take a break.

Two of my favorite places to be: wandering Joshua Tree National Park with my dogs, and SoCal beaches.

When I'm not designing, you'll usually find me watching NBA basketball, out on my skateboard, or listening to music a little louder than I should. I've always been drawn to the things that pull people in and keep them coming back — a great game, a trick you've practiced for weeks, a song that turns your whole day around. It's the same thing I'm after in a product.

What I'm looking for

A while back I stepped up to lead our design team as interim manager — hiring, mentoring, and growing the group. What I loved had little to do with the title: enabling other people to succeed, building trust across the team, and keeping all of us pointed at the user. I'd do it again for a team that needed me. But I found I do my best work closer to the craft: in the research sessions, in the design file, in the details. So I'm looking for senior individual-contributor roles where I can dig into hard, ambiguous problems and bring the full range of what I do, from research all the way through to production.

If you're building something where people's money and trust are on the line, I'd love to connect. Feel free to reach out.