Designer, builder, in the middle of a career.
Fifteen years across enterprise AI surfaces and the quiet little tools I build for myself on Saturday mornings.
I am a product designer fifteen years in. I lead design at small AI companies and large software companies, sometimes both in the same year. I have shipped enterprise surfaces touched by hundreds of millions of people, and weekend toys that have been used by exactly one.
What I do most days is sit with a hard problem until the shape of it becomes obvious. Then I draw what the solution looks like · usually wrong the first time · and we build it. I work in pencil first, code second, Figma third. The order matters. Pencil is for thinking. Code is for finding out. Figma is for handing off.
I am happiest when the work is small, the team is small, and the problem is impossibly large. I distrust roadmaps that look like calendars. I trust craft that survives a code review. I would rather ship one careful thing this quarter than four pretty ones.
- 01Pencil first. Code second. Figma third. The order matters.
- 02Ship the boring thing. The exciting thing usually breaks during demo.
- 03A repo's README is the real brief. A commit log is a sketchbook.
- 04If you can't draw it on a napkin, you don't understand it yet.
- 05Restraint reads as confidence. Most decoration is anxiety.
- 06Make the system. Then break it on purpose, exactly once.
- Lives in Petaluma, CA.
- Wife Claudia. Daughters Adalina and Valentina, 4 and 1. Carmela the shepherd mix.
- Long-distance running. Slow.
- Cooks Thursdays. Pasta from scratch since the pandemic.
- Plays one bad guitar.
- Believes the best font on the laptop is whatever ships with the OS.