Customer obsession is a margin strategy.
The customer or the P&L: most companies treat that as a trade-off. I run design and product organizations that refuse it, and fifteen years in regulated industries have taught me that when experience and economics are designed as one system, each one pays for the other.
Strategy dies in the gap between what the board decides and what the team ships on Monday. I live in that gap. I turn boardroom ambition into work a team can actually do, and make sure what we learn from customers gets back to the people making the bets.
Rebuilding how a company decides what to build, not just what it ships.
Owning the roadmap and the number attached to it.
Conversion, retention, and adoption as design problems — experimentation, funnel diagnostics, and GEO as the instruments.
Design out of the service-desk model and into the decisions, on operating models built to SVPG principles.
Teams that survive reorgs, budget cuts, and leadership changes because the practice is real.
Generative AI in the delivery path, not alongside it — and the enablement that makes teams use it.
Evidence, journeys, and language as one discipline. A field researcher by origin; the function built twice.
An approach that bridges user empathy and unit economics.
Five steps, in this order. The sequence is the argument: nothing gets designed before the friction has a number attached, and nothing ships before the operational reality behind it has been proven.
Define the vision
Strategy is not just planning; it is choosing what not to do.
I get leaders to agree on one destination before anyone builds anything. Market signals, competitor moves, and company goals all point somewhere — my job is to name that place clearly enough that teams stop patching this quarter’s pain and start building next year’s advantage.
Quantify the friction
Data turns opinions into business cases.
I go looking for where friction is costing money, and I use operational data to find it rather than broad discovery. Once the opportunity has a number attached, teams prioritize by what it is worth instead of by who argued hardest.
Architect the ecosystem
A digital promise requires an operational guarantee.
The interface is the easy part. Every promise made to a customer on screen has to be backed by a workflow someone can actually run, so I design both sides — and what ships holds up when the volume arrives.
De-risk execution
Viability must precede velocity.
In a regulated business, usability testing is not enough. I pressure-test the business logic, the compliance requirements, and the technical reality before development starts, because a rebuild costs far more than an early hard conversation.
Measure value
True success is a balanced equation.
I measure business impact, customer experience, and employee experience together. A product that helps the P&L by pushing work onto customers, partners, or staff has not succeeded — it has just moved the problem somewhere quieter.
Fifteen years, four regulated industries.
Regulated industries punish the usual playbook. Compliance, clinical risk, and legal review sit between every good idea and the customer, and moving anything through them without stalling the work is a narrow skill. It is most of what I have done since 2011.
Led design, research, service design, and content strategy as one function: an organization of 80+, with directors reporting to me and senior managers reporting to them. Partnered with product and engineering to transition CMS to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and built the enterprise's first modern component library, cutting site build cycles from twelve months to weeks. Partnered with product, pharmacy, clinical, and operations leaders to orchestrate complex pharmacy workflows on Palantir, shaping how the platform was applied to clinical operations and the interfaces built on top of it. Ran continuous A/B and multivariate testing on walgreens.com, drove a 200% increase in shopping funnel conversion, and led the GEO implementation across the web estate. Set the AI strategy for the design function — a design system connected to production code, where AI ships a UI change in two steps instead of six.
2022Realigned the division's portfolio for product-market fit and founded the Research Center of Excellence, building the customer needs index and prioritization framework that let research drive enterprise investment decisions directly.
2021Built the company's first UX function, design system, and digital adoption strategy, and delivered univarsolutions.com — cutting regulatory document delivery from eight weeks to minutes.
2019Led experience strategy for the rail optimization product suite, designing decision-support systems for rail operators — putting algorithmic recommendations in front of experts accountable for the outcome. Grounded in contextual inquiry and ethnographic fieldwork inside live rail operations, studying how people do consequential work under time and safety pressure.
2016Built and ran the firm's client practice, and now advise on direction and growth strategy.
2011Transformation can't happen when it's only external and outward-facing. You have to think about everything that must change to be customer-centric.Read the summit recap
Opinions I will defend.
Most companies that call themselves customer-centric are not. The org chart tells you before the NPS does.
Reliability is customer centricity. The system has to work before anyone can transact.
Customer insight is one input into prioritization, not all of them.
The best screen designer on my team is now a machine. Judgment and taste are the human job.
Five things my teams can count on
Radical honesty, delivered respectfully.
Feedback in my organizations is fast, specific, and about the work. I would rather tell you something uncomfortable in week one than let you find it in a performance review. That is how a team adapts quickly instead of politely.
Autonomy—you own how the work gets done.
I hire problem-solvers, not order-takers. Once the strategy and the constraints are clear, my job is clearing roadblocks, not holding the wheel. Autonomy only works when ownership comes with it.
Demanding, never demeaning.
Fierce debate sharpens thinking; fear shuts it down. We stress-test the work, never the person, and we treat a failure as data rather than a verdict on someone's character. I will push you to excel, never to break.
Credit goes to whoever did the work.
My ego is attached to the business outcome, not the spotlight. Amplifying your impact is the job; competing with you for credit would waste both our time. Team wins beat solo wins every quarter.
I invest in where you are going next.
I am the launchpad, not the lid. Supporting you means asking for more than you thought you had. Teams that keep growing keep earning; teams that plateau get expensive.
What I do when I am not doing this.
I formulate skincare products to treat hyperpigmentation and eczema.
I take french lessons as I love the language and want to speak it fluently.
Making an app that tells people what's actually on their ballot. Prototyping is still the fastest way for me to think.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman
Nine case studies, shared privately.
The detailed work—the wins and the lessons—live behind a passphrase. Some details are too sensitive to publish, but I believe in transparency. If you want the unfiltered truth, just ask. I’ll share it with you directly.