Over 20 years, most recently as Director of Product Experience at Teradata, I scaled a 6-person team into a 50-person multidisciplinary org, grew design system adoption steadily through a structured contribution model, replaced $1M in annual research consulting with an always-on in-house capability, and kept voluntary attrition near 3% through a near-decade of organizational change.

I'm looking for the next hard design problem, the kind where the org, the practice, and the product all need to move together.

I've been a builder my whole life. As a kid, I made architectural drawings, crafted scale model stadiums out of cardboard and whatever I could find in the garage, and spent hours on model airplanes, paying as much attention to how they looked as how they went together. I also had every baseball player's stats memorized from the back of their cards. The kid who obsessed over aesthetics and had every batting average memorized. Both lived in the same brain, always.

That combination, the aesthetic and the operational, is probably the most honest explanation of what I do for a living.

I gravitated toward design because I think visually and care deeply about how things feel to use. I gravitated toward leadership because I've always been the person organizing the team, figuring out the structure, thinking about how the pieces connect. I was team captain before I knew what a design org was.

What I've spent 20 years learning is how to make those two things work together inside companies. Design doesn't struggle because designers aren't talented. It struggles because the systems around it don't support it. The processes are wrong, the team is underfunded, the work can't be measured, or nobody's made the case to the people who control the budget. I fix that.

I care a lot about the people doing the work. Low attrition on my team was never a goal I optimized for. It was a byproduct of building an environment where people felt like the work mattered and someone was paying attention. I think that's just what good leadership looks like.

I've spent my whole life in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. Grew up here, built my career here, still here. I've known who I am for a long time. Turns out that's enough to build from.