About

Product and UX leader who thinks like a strategist first and a designer second. Twenty plus years building software and teams, the last several spent shaping AI powered platforms in legal tech and competitive intelligence. Good at walking into a domain cold, doing the research to actually understand it, and shipping something real.

Work experience

LinkSquares

Senior Director of UX / Nov 2019 – Present

AI powered contract lifecycle management platform used by legal and finance teams.

• Built the UX org from scratch. Hired two UX and UX Research Directors plus five to seven more designers and researchers over six years, and stood up the company’s first real user research practice.
• Walked into Finalize, the company’s pre-signature contracting product, with no background in the space. Ran discovery from zero, then defined, tested, and spec’d the product for an offshore engineering team. It became a milestone release that helped unlock a critical funding round.
• Pushed UX ownership past the chat window itself, shaping how and when the platform’s AI agent shows up inside Salesforce and everywhere else it lives in the product.
• Built the process for triaging customer and internal feedback, and still gets on calls directly with customers when a usability issue needs solving.

Crayon

Director of Product Design / Jun 2018 – Nov 2019

AI powered competitive intelligence platform for sales, marketing, and product teams.

• Had never touched a competitive battlecard before this job. Ran user interviews to learn what reps actually needed, then designed and led delivery of an embedded battlecard feature, including Competitive Advantage, SWOT, and Kill Sheet formats, live inside Salesforce.
• Built an inline editor so non-technical users could update cards fast, plus mobile friendly layouts for reps in the field, all while working around a third party embed that had to degrade gracefully instead of breaking.
• Added commenting so sales and marketing could discuss intel in context, then noticed reps themselves were a great source of new intel and built a way for them to feed it straight back into the platform.

Talla

VP of Design / Jan 2016 – May 2018

Early stage, VC backed startup building AI and chatbot tools to automate enterprise work.

• Set out to build something like an LLM style chat assistant for the enterprise, years before the technology existed to do it well. The idea was a knowledge graph that evolved with a company as wikis went stale and people came and went, with the agent routing questions to the right person when it didn’t know the answer and getting smarter over time.
• Since nobody had really built this before, invented an approach for designing conversation flows flexible enough to handle many different paths but still land somewhere useful. Prototyped and user tested the actual feel of those conversations using a Slack mockup tool.
• Solved the handoff problem. A mockup or a spec doc couldn’t capture branching conversational logic, so translated the flows into diagrams and decision trees engineering could build from.
• Learned the hard way that the AI only worked when people phrased questions almost exactly right. Redesigned the product to handle many ways of asking the same thing, and started building workflow builders so the product didn’t have to lean on AI for everything.

Drync

Creative Director / Jun 2014 – Dec 2015

iOS app that lets users scan wine labels to learn about, rate, and buy wine for delivery.

• Led a full redesign of the app’s UX and UI across iOS, web, and mobile web, working closely with iOS engineers on interactions and transitions.
• Rebuilt the entire purchase experience: separate flows for first time and returning buyers, saved and new shipping addresses, card scanning at checkout, and a gifting flow that handled the fact that wine needs an adult signature on delivery.
• Increased sales by streamlining the bottle scanning and checkout flows.
• Later extended the product into a white label platform so local wine stores could run their own branded storefront, with self-service inventory management and their own subscriber base. Dozens of stores signed on before the rollout was handed off to someone else.

Tapjoy

Creative Director, Ad Products / Jul 2012 – Jun 2014

Mobile ad products and advertising technology for a global network of game developers.

• Sat in on enough cross functional meetings to notice a real problem. As new devices flooded the market with wildly different screen sizes, ad units needed a custom build for every size and orientation, something most small studios didn’t have the resources for. That was quietly shrinking the pool of usable ad inventory.
• Designed and shipped a system that let developers build one square asset that scaled automatically to any device, size, or orientation, removing that barrier across the whole platform.
• Pitched taking Tapjoy direct to consumers with an app discovery product: personalized recommendations meant to drive more downloads across the network at a time when the App Store was oversaturated and users were overwhelmed.
• Ran interviews and testing through development. When people said they wanted to know why an app was being recommended, designed a flip card interaction that revealed the reasoning, and led onboarding design for the whole experience.

Viximo

Creative Director / 2008 – 2012

One of the first wave of designers building for iPhone, shipping a string of one-off apps during the ninety-nine cent gold rush of the early App Store, alongside web and social game design.

Kaneva

Creative Director / 2006 – 2008

Online virtual world and MMORPG platform.

• Ran digital marketing built largely from the virtual world’s own 3D assets, working directly with artists to turn in game content into marketing creative.
• Designed a line of prepaid in-game currency cards that landed on shelves at Target nationally, years before Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam made the same model standard.
• Designed the overlay UI for games running inside the virtual world.

Earlier experience

Coolblue Interactive

Creative Director / 2004 – 2005

Worked up from lead designer to Creative Director, running client design reviews and presentations.

Imarc

Web Designer / 2000 – 2003

Built websites, branding, and marketing collateral, including a high priority project for Starwood Hotels Worldwide.

Projects

DearPanda

Co-founder / 2010 – Present

Founded an education and learning focused app company. Our flagship product, CourseNotes, synced note taking across iPhone, iPad, and Mac and was live at the iPad launch, earning repeat features from Apple.

Education

Plymouth State University

BFA, Graphic Design / 1996 – 2000

Awards

From the Coolblue Interactive years, including work on the San Jose Repertory Theater site.

• Outstanding Website, WebAwards, three wins (2004, 2006)
• Standard of Excellence, WebAwards, two wins (2006), and Best Arts Website, WebAward, for the San Jose Repertory Theater site (2005)
• Gold, Best Home Page Design, Davey Awards (2005)

Skills

Product Strategy · UX & Product Leadership · Team Building & Hiring · User Research & Discovery · AI & Agentic Product Design · 0-to-1 Product Development · Pricing & Packaging · Interaction & Visual Design · Cross-Functional Leadership · Wireframing & Prototyping