Experience

I’ve dedicated nearly 20 years to helping people get the outcomes they need, in ways that are meaningful to them.

As a design leader at VistaPrint, Amazon, Idean, and Saatchi & Saatchi, my teams have helped small businesses get successful marketing outcomes, business users and their teams collaborate on-the-go with custom apps, organizations practice design thinking, and consumers buy and maintain their cars.

I’ve also advised start-ups and delivered projects for clients including Toyota, Solarwinds, Cisco, EastWest Bank, The Volcker Alliance, Mas LA, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and independent creatives.

I hold a B.S. in structural engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.Arch from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design. I’ve worked at Ateliers Jean Nouvel (Paris), Tiantian Xu (Beijing), and Johnston Marklee (Los Angeles) on cultural, educational, public arts, residential, and commercial buildings.

Leadership approach

It’s magical seeing teams who have truly clicked. I’ve helped make this magic happen by facilitating purpose, perspective, practice, product, and people.

My underlying motivation is to make it possible for team members to have meaningful stories to tell, through the impact they have on the people who use our designs. I rely on these leadership and design principles:

• Create meaning –– for customers, the business, the team, and for individual team members.

• Design is inherently optimistic, social, and opinionated. Use it to provoke, define, and align.

• Great design feels inevitable. Embrace optionality and resilience to get there.

• Make others successful. Together, we’ll go places more interesting than we can imagine on our own.

• Reflect, laugh, and celebrate. Take moments to assess –– and have fun!

Skills

I’ve learned how to deliver meaningful outcomes in a variety of contexts by using a set of core skills.

• 0-to-1, transformations, and optimizations: From big swings to fine-tuning, I thrive on making sense out of ambiguity and developing strategies, frameworks, and artifacts to deliver net-new experiences, business and product pivots, and accretive improvements.

• Iterative design: From discovery to roll-out, I believe in the power of design options informed by research and experience. I have helped deliver increasing value to customers and businesses.

• Thought leadership: As a design leader who looks across and beyond, I have been a key thought partner for strategic and tactical efforts, through hands-on work and directional feedback, on the ground and in leadership forums.

• Team management: I have built and evolved nimble design teams for different organizational and design maturities, and helped team members grow and advance on their professional journeys.

• Products, platforms, and features: I have worked directly in or managed team members responsible for: SaaS, productivity tools, developer tools, marketing sites, e-commerce; web, native apps; growth, onboarding, accounts, order life cycle, payments, subscriptions, integrations, recommendations, automations, notifications, design systems, and gen AI.