I design the software people use at work: the forms, dashboards and flows that decide whether their day goes well.
I've been doing this for 15+ years, and leading design since 2014. Most recently I led UX on Amazon's People Experience Foundation team in Seattle, working on the HR systems behind employee documents and the resignation flow in the A to Z app.
Most of my work is unglamorous on purpose. At Amazon that meant a document platform with 4.8 billion records in 67 countries, where each country has its own legal rules. Before that, at Discovery Education, it meant a collaboration tool that had to work on whatever device a student happened to have in front of them. In both places the hard part was the same: getting a lot of people with different constraints to agree on what to build.
I also mentor. I work with early-career designers at Designlab and the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. Teaching keeps me honest. If I can't explain a design decision to someone new to the field, I probably don't understand it as well as I think.
Background
Principal Product Designer
Amazon · People Experience Foundation
Design direction and team management for Amazon’s first Employee Document Management platform: 4.8 billion documents a year across 67 countries, $9M+ in annual savings, and WCAG 2.1 AA compliance for the first time. Owned the evaluation bar for its AI features (accuracy 76% → 93%). Also set north-star UX strategy for Amazon’s retail international expansion, contributing to $10M+ in incremental revenue, and helped shape governance for one of Amazon’s largest internal design systems (200+ contributors).
UX Lead and Design Strategist
Discovery Education
Owned UX strategy for Discovery Education’s core learning platform, used by 4.5M+ educators and students in the U.S. and abroad. Designed Studio end to end (30% more repeat student engagement), led the Media player and Home redesigns, introduced the org’s first UX KPIs and research repository, and drove a 7% national NPS improvement. The platform won Tech and Learning’s 2019 Award of Excellence.
UI Designer
Sears Holdings
Designed Endless Aisle, an in-store touchscreen that let customers buy inventory the store didn't physically carry. Unified the design system across direct marketing and platform teams.
Mentor
Designlab + School of Visual Concepts, Seattle
Long-term mentoring commitment with early-career designers. Focus areas include portfolio development, systems thinking, and navigating the transition from individual contributor to design leader.
How I work
Lead from the front
I don't wait to be handed a brief. I go find the right problem, build shared understanding across teams, and advocate for users in rooms where design doesn't always have a seat. The best outcomes I've been part of came from getting upstream, not from executing downstream.
Accessibility is not a checkbox
On the EDM project I discovered that users with disabilities had been bypassing the entire product because it wasn't screen-readable. They'd adapted by memorizing menu positions. That experience shaped how I approach every project since: inclusive design has to start on day one, because retrofitting it later rarely happens.
Research is a team sport
I've run workshops with HR administrators in Germany, visited Amazon facility employees to understand their actual workflows, and sat with users to watch them navigate products I designed. The insights that change a product rarely come from the research report. They come from being in the room.
Complexity is the starting point
Enterprise design is hard because the problems are hard: legal constraints, country-specific requirements, competing stakeholders, legacy systems. I like that. Most of the interesting design decisions I've made came straight out of a constraint someone told me I couldn't get around.
Teaching and mentoring
I’ve mentored designers for as long as I’ve led design: at Designlab since 2014, at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle since 2020, and with interns and designers on my own teams at Amazon. Over 11 years that adds up to hundreds of mentees. We work on portfolios, career decisions, systems thinking, and the move from individual contributor to design leader. At the School of Visual Concepts I also run portfolio reviews and give guest lectures for UX students.
Where they’ve gone
Former students have gone on to earn master’s degrees, start their own companies, and build long careers in product design. At Amazon, several designers I mentored have moved up into senior IC roles or broader-scope positions.
Why I keep doing it
Mentoring is practice for a big part of senior design work: helping other designers do their best work. Watching a student defend a decision in a portfolio review also shows me which of my own habits I’ve never had to explain.
Currently
Based in Seattle. Until May 2026 I led design on enterprise HR products at Amazon. Now actively exploring Principal-level design leadership roles at companies building at scale.
When I'm not designing: mentoring, laser cutting things in my garage, and tinkering with home automation setups that are almost always more complicated than they need to be.