About
I believe great design makes the complex feel simple — and people happy.
I'm a Product Design Leader and Teacher based in Seattle with 15 years of experience designing enterprise systems at global scale. Most of that time has been at Amazon, where I currently lead UX on the People Experience Foundation team.
My work tends to live at the intersection of scale and humanity. I've designed systems managing billions of documents across 67 countries, built real-time collaboration tools for K–12 classrooms, and redesigned learning experiences used by millions of students and educators. The common thread isn't the subject matter — it's the conviction that complex systems deserve thoughtful, accessible, human-centered design.
I'm also a practicing mentor. I work with early-career designers at Designlab and the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. Teaching keeps me honest — explaining your decisions clearly to someone learning the craft is one of the best ways to pressure-test whether you actually understand them yourself.
Background
Lead Product Designer
Amazon · People Experience Foundation
Leading UX strategy and execution across enterprise HR products, including the Employee Document Management platform managing 4.8 billion documents across 67 countries. Delivered $10M+ in annual savings, accessibility compliance, and a global product rollout spanning multiple legal jurisdictions.
Lead Product Designer
Discovery Education
Led design across the Discovery Education platform: Studio (real-time classroom collaboration), Media (iterative video player redesign), and Home (platform homepage redesign). Products served K–12 teachers and students across the country.
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 be built in from the start, not retrofitted at the end.
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 genuinely hard. Legal constraints, country-specific requirements, competing stakeholder needs, legacy systems. I don't find this discouraging. Constraints are where good design actually happens — they're what separates interesting solutions from obvious ones.
Currently
Based in Seattle. Working on enterprise HR products at Amazon. 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.