About
Every part of a product means something. Everything speaks.
The short version of who I am and how I work
Bio
I've spent twenty years leading design teams. The best ones are mixed: product designers, researchers, visual designers, front-end engineers, writers all working together. Most of my work has been in complex SaaS, where the hard part is making the complicated feel simple.
I care most about building teams where design has a real say in decisions. Not just the screens—the strategy. That means a high bar for the work, ownership for everyone doing it, and learning to use new tools without chasing every trend. My strength is the structure: how a design organization is built, how it connects with product and engineering, how a team moves with clarity.
At DigitalOcean I led design for the product developers use first. The goal is getting someone from sign-up to a working deploy. At IBM I built self-service setup tools for enterprise hiring software. Customers could configure the system themselves instead of waiting weeks for a services team. The work cut handoff time by 40% and grew a client's revenue 15x.
I have an MFA in Communication Design and a BFA in Graphic Design. I came up in theatre before I came up in design. That background shapes how I lead: clear vision, right pacing, good casting, trust the team to deliver.
Design borrows a lot from theatre, and I lean on both
How I lead
I came up in theatre. The way a director thinks about pacing, casting, and attention is how I think about running a team. Know who you're talking to. Know when to push and when to wait. Set up your team well and trust them to deliver.
The other half comes from teaching. Critique rooms teach you that experiments matter more than answers. Tight feedback loops make better work. I keep teams in motion: try things, look honestly at what happens, fix what's broken, repeat.
Core principles
Pay attention to the audience
Start every project by understanding who's on the other side of it. What they need. What confuses them. Where they get stuck. Design follows from that.
Pacing is part of the work
Knowing when to slow a team down to think and when to push them to ship matters. A team moving at the right pace stays sharp. One that moves wrong burns out or drifts.
Iterate in public
Show work early. Show it often. The best teams get comfortable showing rough work and improving it together instead of polishing alone and revealing when it's done.
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 at a product company. I want design positioned to influence business and technology decisions, and a team ready for someone who holds a high bar for craft.
Fractional design leadership
One to two days a week, six to twelve months. Senior design voice for a team that doesn't yet need a full-time hire. Includes hiring, building rituals, design-org structure, and direct design work where it matters most.
Advisory
Monthly retainer for founders and design leaders building their design organization. Help with hiring, performance frameworks, vision documents, design systems, AI integration. Lower-touch than fractional work.
Project work
Defined scope and timeline. Brand systems, product redesigns, pitch documents, AI experience design. Works best when the brief is real, stakes are interesting, and there's room for the work to be opinionated.
Speaking and teaching
Single events or short series on design leadership, AI in product, organizational design, theatre and design. Conferences, internal team sessions, university guest lectures.
Design is serious craft. Leading designers is what I love most in this practice. The teams I build move with clarity, hold a high bar for the work, and stay interested in the people they're designing for. Good teams make better products.