About
I sit at the intersection of design leadership, team building, and product strategy. I specialize in scaling design organizations from the ground up, building the systems and culture that let teams do their best work, and connecting design craft to real business outcomes. Over the past decade I've grown teams from 1 to 26, built design systems adopted across entire companies, and helped scale a product line from $500M to over $5B in revenue. I'm also a speaker, facilitator, podcast host, and builder — passionate about creating frameworks that make collaboration better and amplifying underrepresented voices in design and tech.
My journey into technology started when I was 12 years old — not because I had access, but because something was taken away.
Growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, my family's home was burglarized while we were away at summer camp. It was devastating. But in the aftermath, my father's organization donated a computer to our household. It was an old, unbranded machine running Windows — essentially a blank canvas. I started spending Fridays at Barnes & Noble reading PC magazines, figuring out which parts I needed — a sound card, a graphics card, a 56K modem — until I had a machine that could run Microsoft Flight Simulator online and host my first website on Yahoo GeoCities.
A few summers later, I noticed that my mother's school didn't have a website. I offered to build one, and she advocated for a paid role. That was my first job in tech. I was the webmaster.
I went on to study Art and Art History with a focus on Graphic Design at the University of Iowa, where I also played Division I football. The weight room at 5 AM taught me more about discipline, commitment, and pushing through discomfort than any design course — lessons I still carry into how I lead teams.In college, I co-founded a concert promotion company in Iowa. We booked, marketed, produced, and ticketed shows without funding, grossing close to $100K within three months at our peak. Five of the acts we booked went on to have Grammy-nominated songs. That experience taught me to trust my instincts, build diverse teams, and understand that perspective is everything when you're trying to reach different audiences.
Early in my career, I collaborated with Def Jam and co-founded a web-based music streaming startup. My entrepreneurial spirit led me to Chicago, where I joined Base CRM — a startup later acquired by Zendesk. There, I built the design team from one to five, established design principles, and partnered with the CEO on proposals that landed multiple $1M+ enterprise deals.
Then came LinkedIn. For nearly eight years, I led the Marketing Solutions design team — helping the company connect businesses to over a billion members. I grew the team from 6 to 26, led a platform transformation that supported the business scaling from $500M to over $5B in revenue, and advised on LinkedIn's first AI-assisted marketing tool. I co-founded Black by Design to build a network for Black designers, and I built facilitation frameworks that became the foundation for a Figma Config talk and eventually the Facilitator widget.
In 2020, I launched Technically Speaking — a podcast dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices in design and technology. It's been downloaded in 100+ countries, with 80 episodes and in-person events from Brooklyn to Lisbon.
Right now, I'm on a professional break — traveling the world with my wife, connecting with design communities, building new products, and writing about what I've learned.
Let's work together.
I'm available for speaking engagements, leadership coaching, and advisory work with product and design teams.