Hire a design leader who delivers, and makes AI actually useful.

What you get when you hire me.

I lead design teams to solve hard problems and deliver products that work. That means owning the design org's strategy, hiring and growing senior talent, and setting a bar the whole team rises to. I don't bulldoze. I align first, then push.

I'm a maker as much as a leader. Fifteen years in, I still design and build: I'll sit in Figma, write the copy, and build the front-end when that's what moves the work forward. Teams trust a leader who can do the work, not just review it, and what the people I've led say about it lives on the kind words page.

And I bring AI as a default, not a side experiment. I took a multi-billion-dollar design org AI-first, built an AI agent that cut a recurring 320-hour workflow to about an hour, and drove company-wide adoption with dozens of early users. AI is the biggest shift in how products get made in a generation. I help teams ride it instead of getting flattened by it.

Finally, I lead toward outcomes, not output. I care about the metric that moves and the customer who is better off, not the number of screens produced. I have rebuilt flagship stores that lifted conversion by double digits, turned a stalled paid-social campaign into a hundred-plus paying subscribers in a week, and turned slow design orgs into ones that deliver with evidence. The deliverable is a better business, and a team that can keep delivering after I am gone.

Three ways to work together.

Full-time leadership. I'm open to Director, VP, and C-suite design roles where you need one person to own the craft, the team, and the AI roadmap. I will set the vision, hire and grow the people, build the system, and stay close enough to the work to keep the bar high. My resume has the full history.

Fractional and consulting. Through my agency, Surf Studios, I take on fractional design leadership and consulting, embedding with your team to set strategy, build the design system, and level up the org, the senior leadership of a VP without a full-time headcount. This is a good fit when you have talented people but need direction, or when you are between design leaders and cannot afford to drift.

Project work. Sometimes you don't need a leader, you need the thing built. I design and build complete product experiences and marketing sites end to end, design, UX, and the front-end in the same hands, so nothing gets lost in handoff. See my agency work, or if you're weighing studios, my guide to choosing a product design firm.

Design and AI together, the part most leaders are missing.

Most design leaders are strong on craft and team but treat AI as someone else's problem. Most of the people fluent in AI can't design. I'm one of the few who does both at a senior level: I lead the design, and I drive the AI transformation. That combination is rare, and right now it's exactly what teams need.

What that looks like in practice: I founded Story Genie, an AI-native company where agents write and illustrate personalized hardcover children's books while humans supervise, live and delivering today. I authored the AI vision and roadmap for the executive team of a multi-billion-dollar apparel platform. I build production AI agents that remove real hours from real workflows, not slideware demos. And I do it without losing the craft, because AI that churns out junk faster is not progress.

The gap between good and great is no longer technical skill, it's curiosity and the willingness to build. The designers and teams most at risk are the ones who keep waiting for permission. I help teams close that gap before it closes on them, turning AI from an anxiety into an advantage.

Why a design-and-AI leader, and why now.

Every product team is being asked the same question this year: what do we do about AI? Most answers are either hype with no working product, or paralysis. The teams that win treat AI as a new material to design with, the way they once learned mobile or the web, and they need a leader who understands both the craft and the technology to guide that.

That's the role I'm built for. I've sat on both sides: leading a design organization through an AI-first transformation inside a multi-billion-dollar apparel company, and founding an AI-native startup from zero. I know where AI genuinely speeds things up, where it quietly degrades quality, and how to keep humans in the loop on the decisions that matter. I can set the strategy and then sit down and build the prototype that proves it.

If your design org is producing slower than the business moves, if research and good judgment are being treated as luxuries, or if AI is happening to your team instead of being led by it, that's the problem I solve.

How I work.

I start with the problem, then the why, because the stated problem is usually a symptom of a bigger one. Then I lean on research, best practices, and prior art instead of reinventing. I follow Marty Cagan's problem-and-opportunity approach; the book "Inspired" is required reading on my teams.

I run growth as a design problem, not an afterthought, and I measure. On one product I took a stalled paid-social launch over and drove a hundred-plus paying subscribers in the first week, recurring revenue rather than one-off sales. See that work.

I communicate plainly and decide with evidence. No decoration, no theater.

What working with me looks like.

Early on, I spend more time listening than talking. I want to understand the business, the team, the constraints, and the real problem before I start moving things around. Good leadership is not a list of opinions; it is earning the trust to make hard calls and then making them.

From there I work in the open: shared strategy, working prototypes over decks, weekly evidence instead of quarterly reveals. I hire and grow senior people, I build or repair the design system so the team can move fast without drifting, and I bring AI into the workflow where it earns its place. You get a leader who raises the bar and a maker who can demonstrate it.

Whether you bring me in full-time, fractionally through Surf Studios, or for a single project, the goal is the same: deliver products people remember, and leave the team stronger than I found it.

Who I have done this for.

A multi-billion-dollar B2B and B2C apparel platform (design leadership plus an AI-first transformation), Story Genie as founder, Surf Studios delivering brands end to end, plus Kinjo, Supply Drop, Enverus, and The Mysterious Package Company.

I'm based in Austin, Texas, and I work with teams anywhere.