About
Every part of a product means something. Everything speaks.
A look at the philosophy and practice driving my design leadership
Bio
Senior design leader with 20+ years leading multidisciplinary teams across product design, research, visual design, front end, and technical writing. Most credible in complex SaaS product environments, with a track record of simplifying complexity, strengthening product direction, and building for scalability.
I build teams where design has meaningful influence on business, product, and technology decisions. I keep a high bar for craft and stay ahead of how emerging technologies are reshaping design. The strength I bring is organizational design, cross-functional collaboration, and helping teams work with greater clarity, ownership, and impact.
At DigitalOcean I led a team building intuitive product for cloud developers, blending data with creativity to drive results. At IBM I crafted self-service tools that met the needs of technically complex environments, pushing design at the speed of business. Cutting handoff time by 40% and growing client revenue 15x are two of the numbers behind that work.
An MFA in Communication Design and a BFA in Graphic Design ground the practice. A background in theatre directs the leadership: setting a clear vision, pacing the story, building the cast, and trusting them to deliver.
Design borrows a lot from theatre, and I lean on both
How I lead
I came up in theatre before I came up in design, and the way a director thinks about pacing, casting, and where to put the audience's attention is still the way I think about running a team. Knowing who you're talking to. Knowing when to push and when to wait. Trusting the cast to do their job once you've set them up well.
The other half of how I work comes from teaching. I spent enough time in critique rooms to know that the experiments matter more than the answers, and that the tightest feedback loops produce the best work. I keep teams in motion: try things, look at them honestly, change what's not working, repeat until the thing is real.
Core principles
Pay attention to the audience
Every project starts with figuring out who's on the other side of it. What they need, what they don't know yet, where they're going to get stuck. The design follows from that, not the other way around.
Pacing is part of the work
Knowing when to slow a team down to think, and when to speed them up to ship, is one of the most underrated parts of leading design. A team that moves at the right pace stays sharp. One that doesn't burns out or drifts.
Iterate in public
Show work early. Show it often. The best teams I've led are the ones that get comfortable putting rough work in front of each other and improving it together, instead of polishing in isolation and unveiling.
Status
Available for new work
First and foremost, open to full-time design leadership roles. Also open to fractional engagements, advisory work, and select projects where the brief is real and the stakes are interesting.
Formerly
- IBM
- DigitalOcean
- SCAD
Citizenship
United States · Italy
Italian by paperwork: a long, weird story about passport offices and birth certificates that I am happy to tell over a drink. Useful side effect: faster passport control, and yes, eligible to work in the EU. Per favore non chiedermi di parlare italiano.
How I work
The shapes of an engagement.
Full-time leadership
Senior or VP-level design leadership inside a single product company. First priority. Open to roles where design is positioned to influence business, product, and technology decisions, and the team is ready for someone who will hold a high bar for craft.
Fractional design leadership
One to two days a week, six- to twelve-month engagements. Standing in as the senior design voice for a team that doesn't yet need a full-time hire. Includes hiring, ritual-setting, design-org wiring, and direct design work where it matters most.
Advisory
Monthly retainer for founders and design leaders building or rebuilding their design organization. Hiring help, performance frameworks, vision documents, design-system decisions, AI integration questions. Lower-touch than fractional, longer arc.
Project work
Defined scope, defined dates. Brand systems, product redesigns, pitch documents, AI experience design. Best when the brief is real and the stakes are interesting, and there's room for the work to be opinionated.
Speaking + teaching
Single events or short series on design leadership, AI in product, organizational design, the relationship between theatre and design. Conferences, internal team sessions, university guest lectures.
Design is a craft I take seriously, and leading designers is the part of the practice I love most. The teams I build move with clarity, hold a high bar for the work, and stay genuinely interested in the people they're designing for. When all of that is in place, the product gets better and so does everyone making it.