About

Most of my work starts with a diagnosis. Something isn't working — not at the interface, but underneath it. The journey breaks at a team boundary. A platform decision made two years ago quietly shapes everything downstream. The org structure and the customer experience have never been formally introduced.

That's where I come in.

For the past twenty years, I've worked at the intersection of service design, design leadership, and the organizational systems that make or break both. At Capital One, I led design across auto lending, then moved to the ML and data platform org — building design function inside engineering-led terrain. Before that: USAA, where I led service design work. Before that, Adaptive Path, where I helped establish service design as a practice. (Two of the early books in the field — I contributed to both.)

Today I work through Harmonic Design as Executive Partner. My current engagements span a major airline — journey management, crew experience, platform replatforming — and a financial services firm working through what AI capability actually means for expert human work. Different industries, same pattern: the hard problem isn't the design. It's the system the design has to live inside.

I also speak — at conferences, universities, and inside companies — on journey management, design leadership, and what it takes for design to operate at the right level in a complex organization.