Design Leader
ContactCURRENTLY DigitalOcean
PREVIOUSLY SCAD
IBM
Skeptic
Philographica
Selbert Perkins Design
Design Leader
ContactCURRENTLY DigitalOcean
PREVIOUSLY SCAD
IBM
Skeptic
Philographica
Selbert Perkins Design
Set Users Up for Success
Empowerment by Design
Driving Growth Through Design
All the World’s a Map
Luxury Reimagined
ABOUT Who I Am, What I Build
Philosophy of Leadership
wRITINGS We Don’t Need Another Framework
Design Leadership Is Cultural Leadership
Designers Should Own the Narrative
Speed and Substance Can Coexist
Collaboration Is the Work
Design as Stewardship of Experience
Revamping onboarding for DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean’s onboarding process was complex, especially for users new to cloud infrastructure. This hindered new user retention and team collaboration, as project owners struggled to invite team members during setup.
APPROACHI led a cross-functional effort to address this, aligning design, product, and engineering in a collaborative model. By emphasizing user-centered design, we set out to simplify the onboarding journey while driving long-term engagement.
SOLUTIONIntroduced a bulk email invitation feature during sign-up, paired with educational tooltips on roles and permissions to enhance security and usability. Planned a second phase for more advanced team customization options, reinforcing personalization and user empowerment.IMPACT
Achieved a 30% reduction in ‘Time to First Value.’
Increased team collaboration by 20%, as measured by onboarding analytics.
Received positive feedback from users, with one stating, “Inviting team members has never been easier.”
DISCIPLINE COLLABORATORS
The Democratization of AI Set Up
The Watson Candidate Assistant faced a critical challenge: its traditional, service-heavy setup process required extensive customization for each client. This approach was unsustainable, time-intensive, and inaccessible to non-technical users. The result? Lengthy installation times and frustrated users, limiting the product’s adoption and scalability.
APPROACHI spearheaded a cross-functional initiative to redesign the setup experience, shifting from developer-led customization to a scalable, self-service model. Partnering with the Offering Manager and involving a diverse team from design, development, support, and sales, we pursued a bold vision to democratize the AI setup process, empowering users of all technical backgrounds.
Our strategy included: Iterative Design Sprints: Testing and refining prototypes based on constant user feedback.IBM Carbon Framework: Leveraging a modern design system to create a future-ready, intuitive UI.Cross-Functional Collaboration: Aligning stakeholders on a user-first approach, focusing on accessibility and simplicity.SOLUTIONThe resulting Watson Talent Self-Service Admin Tool transformed the setup process into an empowering, app-like experience. Key innovations included:
- A guided setup interface enabling users to configure the product themselves without technical assistance.
- Educational tooltips and in-app guidance to foster confidence and reduce errors.
- Scalable features that supported customization while maintaining simplicity.
This shift fundamentally redefined the product, making it more accessible and user-friendly while significantly reducing dependency on technical teams.
IMPACT
The results of this transformation were profound:
- Reduced installation times by over 90%, from several weeks to just a few days.
- Enhanced user satisfaction, as reported in post-implementation surveys.
- Enabled internal teams to focus on innovation and value-add features rather than repetitive setups.
- Positioned Watson Candidate Assistant as a leader in user-friendly AI applications, driving broader adoption and engagement.
DigitalOcean’s growth team had traditionally been engineering-driven, with limited integration of design in strategic decision-making. The challenge was to embed a modern, user-centered design approach that could accelerate user acquisition, improve customer retention, and drive innovation.
APPROACHAs a design leader, I introduced a bold, experimental methodology that redefined the role of design within the growth team. My strategy included:
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Tripartite Collaboration: Positioning design as an equal partner with product management and engineering.
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Process Innovation: Establishing a structured yet flexible framework for idea intake, alignment, and rapid iteration.
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Cultural Shift: Fostering a culture of experimentation where failures were stepping stones to innovation.
This approach emphasized transparency, alignment, and the power of strategic design thinking to solve complex problems and improve business outcomes. SOLUTION
- Growth Phase 1: The Initializer: A replicable intake and alignment process that ensured all ideas—whether from junior developers or senior executives—were considered and refined collaboratively.
- Iterative Prototyping: A rapid prototyping and testing cycle that reduced the time from ideation to implementation.
- Documentation & Transparency: Clear records of every step ensured team alignment and empowered contributors at all levels.
- Improved user acquisition and retention metrics, validating the integration of design into the growth team’s workflow.
- Enhanced team agility and innovation, allowing faster responses to market demands.
- A cultural shift that recognized design as a critical driver of growth and innovation.
Broadway’s rich history of artistic collaboration is complex and interconnected, making it difficult to visualize and understand. Traditional narratives often fail to capture the intricate web of relationships between directors, choreographers, composers, and lyricists, leaving enthusiasts and educators searching for a more engaging way to explore this vibrant cultural legacy.
APPROACHTo bridge this gap, I designed the Broadway Musical Theatre History Subway Map (BMHSM), a dynamic visualization of Broadway’s collaborative networks. My strategy included:
- Transforming Data into Design: Reimagining the history of musical theatre collaborations as a navigable subway map, where each line represents a key figure and intersections highlight shared projects.
- Engaging Format: Combining functionality with artistic appeal, the map serves as both a decorative artifact and an interactive educational tool.
- Iterative Refinement: Regular updates since 2008 have ensured the map reflects new discoveries and maintains relevance for its audience.
- A Metro-Style Diagram: Lines for iconic theatre professionals, intersections for shared productions, and stops for key works.
- Educational and Entertaining: Users can trace the connections between shows like Into the Woods and Show Boat, or follow the collaborations of legends like Stephen Sondheim.
- Large-Format Design: Available in sizes up to 36x24 inches, the map invites exploration and serves as a conversation-starting centerpiece.
- Educational Use: Featured in classrooms and academic institutions, enhancing learning about musical theatre history.
- Professional Recognition: Sold in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts gift shop, cementing its cultural and scholarly value.
- Audience Delight: Praised for its design and detail, with customers calling it a “masterpiece” and a “treasure for theatre lovers.”
Joanna Czech’s e-commerce platform struggled to reflect her status as a luxury brand. The grayscale, functional design failed to capture her high-end aesthetic, limiting user engagement and holding back business growth. The challenge was to elevate her digital presence to match her celebrity reputation while driving significant revenue growth.
APPROACHI led a comprehensive digital transformation rooted in strategic design and collaboration. My approach included:
- Creative Direction: Redefining the brand’s digital aesthetic to exude luxury and exclusivity.
- User-Centered Design: Conducting research to craft an intuitive and visually engaging user experience.
- Content Strategy: Aligning website content with Joanna’s successful social media presence to ensure a seamless journey from click to purchase.
- Scalable Framework: Designing with scalability in mind to support rapid business growth.
- A narrative-driven interface that transformed every interaction into an extension of Joanna’s expertise.
- Sophisticated visual design leveraging fundamental principles like point, line, and plane to evoke elegance and simplicity.
- Integrated social media strategies to drive traffic and create a cohesive brand ecosystem.
- Streamlined navigation and purchasing flows to enhance user engagement and conversion rates.
The transformation delivered remarkable business results:
- Increased annual revenue from $300K to $5M in three years.
- Elevated Joanna Czech’s brand perception as a leader in luxury skincare.
- Improved user satisfaction, as evidenced by higher engagement metrics and repeat customers.
A look at the philosophy and practice driving my design leadership
Design leader with 20+ years of experience driving AI-powered, human-centered product strategy across enterprise platforms, content systems, and e-commerce.
I lead with clarity and scale through systems—building design orgs, launching embedded AI experiences, and delivering results across UX, documentation, and platform design. From cutting handoff time by 40% to growing client revenue 15x, I bring strategic vision, team leadership, and a deep belief that joy and simplicity are essential to every experience.
My experiences empower and inspire. At DigitalOcean, I lead a talented team to deliver intuitive, impactful solutions for cloud developers, blending data-driven insights with creativity to drive real results. My work at IBM focused on crafting self-service tools that met the needs of even the most technically complex environments, pushing design at the speed of business.
With an MFA in Communication Design and a BFA in Graphic Design, my background in theatre and design drives my approach—emphasizing collaboration, innovation, and a relentless focus on human-centered design. I’m passionate about mentoring and building teams that push boundaries, solve problems, and anticipate the future.
Leadership for me isn’t just about managing—it’s about fostering environments where ideas thrive, driving alignment, and empowering people to deliver excellence.
Design as Story, Leadership as Direction
Leadership, like theatre, is about creating connection. It’s knowing your audience, pacing the story, and orchestrating moments that resonate. I lead teams like a director: bringing diverse voices together, setting a clear vision, and ensuring every detail contributes to the larger narrative.
From my time in academia, I bring a love of experimentation and a focus on measurable outcomes. I believe in crafting environments where bold ideas are tested, refined, and brought to life with both creativity and precision. Like a great production, the work should feel effortless—but only after rigorous preparation.
Core Principles
- Connection to Audience: Every design begins with empathy, anticipating needs and creating solutions that feel intuitive, personal, and impactful.
- Pacing and Energy: Leadership requires rhythm—knowing when to push, when to pause, and how to keep the team aligned and inspired.
- Iterative Excellence: Borrowing from academia, I embrace rubrics and experimentation, blending creativity with metrics to guide both design and growth.
The Vision
Great design tells a story. Great leadership shapes the cast and choreography that make the story possible. Together, they create not just outcomes, but experiences that leave a lasting impression—on teams, users, and the future.
We Don’t Need Another Framework: On Experiential Authority in Design Leadership
There are two kinds of performance in design.
The first kind is essential: how someone shows up in the work. How they notice the tension in a conversation. How they help a team move forward. How they respond when things get ambiguous or political or just plain hard. This kind of performance is about presence, craft, and consistency. It builds trust over time.
The second kind is dangerous. It’s a performance of expertise—the kind that rewards polish over participation, posture over presence. It’s the person who talks convincingly about “driving clarity” but has never clarified a real, messy decision. The person who shows you their Figma files, but never says why they made anything. It’s expertise rendered as theater.
We keep mistaking the second kind of performance for the first. We hire it. Promote it. Sometimes we even become it. Especially in leadership roles, where it’s easier to talk about the work than to stay inside it.
We don’t need more of that.
We don’t need more frameworks, more clever diagrams, more performative rigor that falls apart the minute reality intervenes. We need something rarer, quieter, and far more durable: experiential authority.
Performed Expertise vs. Lived Experience
The design industry has become incredibly good at staging expertise. We know how to build the case study, name the artifact, and rehearse the narrative. It’s a whole performance economy—especially in interviews, portfolios, and conferences. And let’s be honest: some of it is necessary. Some of it is just how you survive.
But it becomes a problem when we confuse knowing how to talk about the work with knowing how to do it.
Experiential authority doesn’t perform. It participates. It’s the kind of leadership that doesn’t need to announce its presence because it’s already inside the product, inside the team, inside the decision. You feel it—not because someone put it on a slide, but because the work holds together. Because the team feels calm, clear, and capable. Because hard conversations happen, and no one flinches.
It’s not that these people don’t use frameworks—they do. But they don’t hide behind them. They use them as tools, not as shields.
What Experiential Authority Looks Like
You know it when you see it.
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It’s the design lead who doesn’t just critique the pixels, but the product strategy behind them—and does it without ego.
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It’s the person who can bridge product, engineering, and design without needing to “own” the room.
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It’s the one who says, “We’re moving too fast to see clearly. Let’s pause,” and people listen.
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It’s the leader who joins the critique and doesn’t take over, but makes the conversation better.
They don’t need to show how much they know. They show how much they’ve noticed.
They give clear feedback, grounded in reality. They remember what a junior designer said last week, and they follow up. They have a feel for the pulse of a team—not from surveys or dashboards, but from being there.
They don’t just talk about impact. They make space for it.
Why This Matters
When teams are led by experiential authority instead of performed expertise, everything changes.
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Collaboration becomes more honest.
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Feedback becomes more generous and direct.
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The product improves—not just because someone “owned” the UX, but because people worked like it mattered.
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Designers start taking real risks because the environment is safe enough to fail.
- Engineers ask better questions because they trust the intent behind the work.
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Product managers stop translating everything into roadmaps and start listening to the nuance of what users need.
The ripple effects are everywhere—but they’re especially visible in how decisions get made. With experiential authority in the room, decisions don’t get made faster. They get made better. With more clarity, less ego, and less rework.
Hiring for the Right Kind of Performance
We need to get better at hiring for real performance—the kind that shows up in collaboration, critique, and decision-making—not the kind that just looks good in a portfolio.
Ask:
• When was the last time you changed your mind about something important?
• Tell me about a time you helped unblock a team that was stuck.
• How do you know when your design is done?
• What’s the last thing you deleted from a project—and why?
Look for people who talk plainly. Who cite real tradeoffs. Who describe not just what they did, but how it felt. Who don’t need to say “I led” every five minutes.
And if you’re in leadership, show what that looks like. Be transparent about your own learning curve. Don’t perform expertise—model inquiry. Show that it’s not only okay to not know; it’s part of the job.
In Praise of Being In It
There’s a quiet power in the leader who is in it. Not micromanaging. Not hoarding decision-making. Just in it—present, listening, asking the right questions, giving others the tools to make the work stronger.
The kind of leadership that doesn’t need to talk about frameworks because they’ve already shaped one: the emotional and intellectual framework of a functioning team.
That’s the kind of performance we should be hiring for. And that’s the kind of authority design actually needs.
How you build teams is how you build products.
Every team produces culture—whether intentionally or not. Through critique habits, Slack etiquette, hiring choices, project pacing, and how decisions get made (or avoided), culture emerges. And once it’s there, it becomes the environment in which all design work lives.
Design leaders are often asked about velocity, craft, and outcomes. But none of those exist in a vacuum. Culture is the substrate. It defines the quality of the thinking, the pace of decision-making, and the emotional weather of the team.
Before a designer sketches a screen, something else has already been designed: the conditions under which they work. Culture.
Culture Is How Intent Gets Made
Intent is often treated like it arrives from above—a strategic memo, a kickoff deck, a mission statement. But in real teams, intent doesn’t descend. It accumulates. It forms slowly, out of shared conversations, unfinished thoughts, disagreements, and convictions that finally settle into something worth building.
This is why culture matters so deeply. Culture creates the conditions under which a team can form shared intent—or fail to.
When a team doesn’t trust each other, intent fragments. You see endless revisiting of goals. You hear people say, “Wait, I thought we were doing X.” Nobody feels confident in the “why,” because nobody felt safe enough to question it when it was fragile.
When the culture is healthy, intent locks in earlier and more clearly. People know what they’re doing and why. And just as importantly, they know how to push back, reshape, and co-author that purpose together.
Culture isn’t a side effect of good work. It’s the thing that allows good work to happen.
Rituals, Language, and Structure Are How Culture Is Made
Culture doesn’t live in values statements. It lives in rituals, in language, in structure—in the daily mechanics of how people interact.
You can see culture in:
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The way critique is facilitated. Who speaks first. Whether junior designers feel safe challenging a lead.
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How design decisions are documented. Are they explained? Revisited? Or just implied and silently enforced?
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How feedback flows up. Whether ICs are expected to perform certainty, or allowed to show thinking in progress.
These moments may seem small, but they are structural. They tell people what’s expected of them. They teach new hires what’s safe to say. They create guardrails or landmines, depending on how they’re handled.
Design leaders don’t just participate in these moments—they shape them. Intentionally or not, they reinforce the norms by modeling what’s allowed, what’s celebrated, and what’s ignored.
Structure is not bureaucracy. It’s care. A thoughtful structure tells people how to succeed without guessing.
Feedback and Accountability Are Cultural Practices
One of the fastest ways to see a team’s culture is to watch how feedback is given—and received.
On underdeveloped teams, critique becomes a performance. People give feedback that centers their own preferences. You’ll hear “If I were doing this…” instead of “What problem is this solving?”
You’ll hear corrections instead of questions.
But in strong cultures, feedback is generous. It lifts the designer toward their own goals, not someone else’s. The critique becomes a conversation, not a correction. There’s an emotional intelligence to it.
This is where accountability also comes into play—not the weaponized version, but the clear, humane kind. Accountability doesn’t mean assigning blame. It means being in right relationship with your work, your collaborators, and your users.
A team that avoids accountability avoids growth. A team that practices it well becomes more resilient—because it knows how to repair.
Collaboration Is Where Culture Is Tested
It’s easy to believe that culture is what happens inside the design team. But the real test of design culture is how it holds up under cross-functional pressure.
Designers don’t work in isolation. They work alongside PMs, engineers, marketing leads, support, and legal. And it’s in these intersections—these tension points—where culture either stretches or snaps.
When trust is low, collaboration slows down. People hedge, withhold, retreat. Every review becomes a performance. Every meeting is a negotiation. But when culture is strong—when people know how to disagree without damaging trust—those same tension points become creative pressure. They refine the work instead of breaking it.
The best design cultures aren’t the ones where everyone agrees. They’re the ones where disagreement doesn’t derail momentum.
The Culture That Exists When You’re Not in the Room
The truest test of leadership isn’t what happens when you’re present. It’s what persists when you’re gone.
Do decisions hold their shape? Do values stay intact? Do teammates still push for clarity, quality, and care even when no one is watching?
Design leaders eventually scale beyond individual critiques, tickets, or projects. But what they leave behind—that’s the work. The rituals they shaped, the trust they modeled, the accountability they encouraged—that’s what remains.
There’s a kind of real delegation that isn’t just about handing something off. It’s about building a system—human and operational—that can survive without your constant involvement. That’s not abdicating responsibility. That’s leadership that lasts.
Culture Is the Product
The way we gather matters. It matters because how we gather is how we live.
—Priya Parker
Culture is not the thing you do once the product is launched. It’s not a retrospective. It’s not a value engraved on a coffee mug.
It is how we decide. How we critique. How we include. How we name risk. How we act when things get hard.
The best design leaders understand this. They know that shaping the team is shaping the product. That if you want to build something durable, it starts with how people treat each other on a random Tuesday afternoon. It starts with the stories we tell each other about why the work matters—and who it’s for.
If you want to understand a leader’s impact, look at their team six months after they’ve left.
What’s still there?
That’s the legacy.
That’s the product.
Storytelling isn’t a slide at the end—it’s the spine of the entire process.
A designer once told me—frustrated, exhausted—“I don’t understand why product keeps telling me what to design. Why are they writing the requirements? ”
My answer was blunt: “because you didn’t.”
If you don’t own the story of the work, someone else will.
Not because they’re trying to steal it. But because there’s a vacuum—and nature, like teams, hates a vacuum.
Product managers will define the problem space. Engineers will define the edge cases. Marketing will define the customer narrative. And none of them are wrong to do so. They’re trying to make sense of something that hasn’t been clearly shaped yet.*
That’s the designer’s job.
And when we abdicate narrative, we also give up influence, coherence, and sometimes, truth.
*and we can’t be upset that they don’t do it the way we would—they aren’t designers
The Narrative Is the Work
Designers often think of storytelling as a final phase—a presentational layer. We storyboard at the end. We write decks. We “position” the work.
But storytelling isn’t what happens after the design.
It’s what holds the design together.
From the first moment we meet a user problem, we are building a narrative:
• What’s the human situation?
• What’s happening that shouldn’t be?
• What needs to change?
• What would resolution look like?
That’s not a branding exercise. That’s design logic.
And if you’re not carrying that logic throughout the work—testing it, refining it, adapting it to different audiences—you’re not really designing. You’re decorating.
Our Work Is Time-Based. And So Is Our Responsibility.
Designers build journeys, not moments. We create movement—through screens, states, emotions, expectations. Our work is time-based, and so is our accountability.
A user experience unfolds. It’s sequenced.
What do they see first? When do they feel clarity? When do they feel friction? When do they feel trust?
If you’re not consciously shaping those beats, someone else is—probably in a spec doc, probably with no real sense of pacing, tone, or emotion.
Don’t let someone else define your sequence.
Try this: In your next kickoff, draw the user’s journey first—not the flowchart, but the emotional arc. Where’s the tension? Where’s the relief? Where’s the moment that makes the whole thing worth it?
That’s storytelling. That’s design.
If You Can’t Explain It, It Doesn’t Matter How It Looks
A beautiful UI that can’t be explained in plain terms is just ornament. You should be able to walk someone through your work in human language. Not buzzwords. Not design jargon. But real narrative:
• “Here’s what we learned.”
• “Here’s the moment we’re designing for.”
• “Here’s why this matters.”
• “Here’s what we’re asking the user to understand or believe.”
If you can’t explain your work with clarity, it’s not ready. If you wait for a PM to write that story for you, they will—through their lens, in their language.
And then you’ll be back where we started: wondering why no one gets what you built.
Storytelling Is Infrastructure
Narrative isn’t a flourish. It’s how we align teams. It’s how we know what we’re building and whether it’s working. It’s how engineering prioritizes. It’s how marketing positions. It’s how leadership advocates.
And it’s how users understand what the hell we’ve made for them.
So why are designers still being trained like storytelling is a “plus” instead of a core skill?
It’s not extra. It’s essential.
Try this: In your next roadmap review, instead of explaining what’s on the screen, explain the moment it serves. Say, “This is the moment when the user is unsure. This is what they’re seeing. This is what we’re trying to move them toward.”
Watch how fast people stop asking about pixels and start asking about outcomes.
We Translate Truth
The best design storytelling isn’t made up. It’s reported.
We don’t invent narratives—we distill them. From research. From real experiences. From conversations, workarounds, pain points, aspirations.
The most compelling design stories are honest.
And they’re tailored. We don’t tell the same story to everyone—we shape it based on what each audience needs to hear to act with confidence.
• To engineers: we clarify sequence and logic.
• To PMs: we clarify tradeoffs and purpose.
• To users: we clarify value and timing.
This isn’t spin. It’s translation.
It’s making sure everyone sees the same shape—no matter which part of it they touch.
Storytelling Is Design Leadership
You want to lead? Start telling the story.
Don’t wait until it’s done. Don’t wait for the deck. Don’t ask someone else to translate it for you.
Start narrating the work from day one. Give people a reason to care. Give them a reason to trust the direction. And give yourself the authority that comes from being the one who actually knows what’s going on.
Designers who own the narrative get more clarity, more alignment, and more impact—not because they talk more, but because they know what they’re saying and why it matters.
Call to Action
Try this tomorrow. In a meeting—kickoff, sync, critique—don’t show the artifact first. Tell the story. The human story. The problem, the insight, the turning point. The stakes.
See what happens when the team understands the experience before they see the interface.
See what happens when you narrate the work, not just unveil it.
You’re not the decorator. You’re the director.
Own the narrative.