1:1 advising
Ongoing sessions for design leaders, product leaders, and designers.
Advisory
Design leadership advisory
Practical guidance from someone who has built, scaled, and transformed design teams, for leaders and designers navigating growth and the shift to AI.
Your thought partner
Coach, sounding board, and second set of eyes on the challenges in front of you, turning what I’ve learned into advantages you can use now.
One-on-one sessions
Focused time on your most pressing questions, reviews of work in progress, and light check-ins between sessions when it helps.
Simple, flexible terms
Month-to-month. Weekly, every other week, or monthly. No long-term commitment.
Ways to work together
What I offer
Design critique
Candid review of work in progress, including AI-generated design.
Hiring support
Role definition, interview loops, portfolio reviews, and candidate calibration.
Fractional help
Part-time design leadership while you find, or grow into, a full-time leader.
Topics
What we’ll tackle together
Every situation is different. These are the areas I know best. Together we’ll figure out what matters most and adapt proven approaches to your context.
Building your team
Hiring designers and managers
Defining the role, finding the right profile for your stage, and running a process that attracts strong candidates.
Designer hiring process
Portfolio reviews, interview loops, and work exercises that actually predict success.
Org structure
Centralized, embedded, or hybrid: designing an org that gets design involved early and stays close to PMs and engineers.
Career ladders & frameworks
Clear expectations by level that make growth, promotions, and calibration fair and transparent.
Performance management
Writing and delivering useful feedback, handling underperformance, and running reviews and calibrations.
Morale & engagement
Keeping a team motivated and steady through growth, reorgs, layoffs, and acquisitions.
Scaling systems, tools & process
Design systems
Starting, revamping, or scaling a design system so a growing platform feels like one coherent product.
Design ops
The rituals, tools, and operating rhythm that let a team scale without losing quality or speed.
Ways of working
Defining a shared product development approach across design, product, and engineering, and training people on it.
Design KPIs & metrics
Measuring design’s impact with flow-level KPIs, instrumentation, and A/B testing.
Brand & visual refresh
Planning and leading a brand refresh or platform-wide visual overhaul without stalling the roadmap.
Customer focus
Building a research practice
Right-sizing research for your stage, from scrappy and ad-hoc to a mature and repeatable practice.
Democratizing research
Training designers and PMs to run their own studies, and sharing what you learn openly across the team.
Ideal customer profile
Defining, or sharpening, who you’re really building for and their top jobs to be done.
Data-informed decisions
Combining qualitative insight with usage data so teams learn and iterate quickly.
Leadership & collaboration
Partnering with product & engineering
Building teams that share ownership of outcomes, not hand-offs.
Executive presence
Communicating design’s value in the language of the business and earning a seat at the table.
Leading design as a product leader
For product leaders who manage designers: how to evaluate, develop, and advocate for design.
Leading through change
Navigating acquisitions, reorgs, IPOs, and team mergers with transparency and stability.
AI & the changing design role
AI-native design workflows
Rolling out AI-assisted prototyping and new tools across a team, with clear adoption milestones.
Designers who ship code
Helping designers go from prototypes to shipping their own pull requests, and what that changes for the team.
Designing AI experiences
Agent UX, platform patterns for AI, and designing for non-deterministic outcomes.
Critiquing AI-generated design
Holding a high bar for quality and coherence when generated design is everywhere.
Evolving roles
How the lines between design, product, and engineering are shifting, and how to prepare your team.
Growing as a designer
Making sense of feedback
Unpacking performance feedback, separating signal from noise, and building a plan.
Work reviews & critique
An experienced eye on your work-in-progress, with candid, constructive critique.
Career coaching
IC, management, or a lateral move? Next level or next company? Thinking through your path.
Portfolio & job search
Telling the story of your impact in your portfolio and interviews.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What does a design leadership advisor do?
I’m an experienced outside partner for the people leading and doing design. We work through real situations together, like hiring, org design, feedback, process, AI adoption, and career moves, so you can make better decisions faster.
Who do you work with?
Design leaders (managers, directors, heads of design, VPs), product leaders who manage designers, and individual designers who want an experienced outside perspective. My background is B2B SaaS, from early-stage startups to public companies.
When is the right time to bring in an advisor?
Common moments: you’re about to scale the team, you’ve just stepped into a bigger role, you’re hiring your first design leader, design reports to you and you want a better handle on it, or your team needs to adapt to AI and you’re not sure where to start.
How does an engagement work?
We start with a free intro call to see if it’s a fit. From there, we set a cadence of one-on-one sessions, typically weekly, every other week, or monthly, on a month-to-month basis. You can cancel anytime.
How much does it cost?
Pricing depends on cadence and format. Reach out and I’ll send you the current options.
Do you do hands-on design work?
No. I advise, coach, and critique, but I don’t produce design deliverables. That keeps my focus on helping you and your team do your best work.
What is your background?
Almost two decades leading product design at VC-backed SaaS companies, most recently as VP of Design at Kong. Before that: SVP of Product & Design at Hologram, VP of UX at Twilio, and VP of UI/UX at SendGrid through its IPO and acquisition by Twilio.
I’ve built teams from scratch, inherited them, scaled them, and restructured them, from a handful of people to 100+. I’ve managed nearly every UX discipline (product design, content design, design systems, research, research ops, design ops, brand, and web), plus data science, product managers, and front-end engineers. I’ve worked at self-serve-first and enterprise-first companies and everything in between. My deepest experience is in technical products and developer tools, but the fundamentals of leading design apply across every domain.
Ready to talk?
Tell me where you and your team are, and where you want to go. The first conversation is free.