Hi there, I'm a senior manager of product design based in San Francisco. Thanks for stopping by and say hi! :)

ADPList Golden Mentor Award 2021

Featured blog post on ADPList: https://blog.adplist.org/post/product-design-process-how-to-ace

My Operating Brief

1. Role & Leadership Context

I manage design across a multi-product enterprise suite (finance, procurement, legal). The part that isn't on the org chart: I'm accountable for coherence of the experience across the entire source-to-pay suite — the experience OKRs land on me, not on any single area — and for building my team's AI capability as a standard for how the work gets made. PM-types are heads-down in their own product lines and structurally can't see across them, so cross-suite contradictions (drifting record pages, overlapping flows across adjacent product lines) are mine to catch.

2. What's Reshaping My Work

Competitive pressure from two sides: agile, UX-led startup challengers shipping slick interfaces fast, and entrenched ERP incumbents holding the install base. Internal pressure compounds it — premium pricing, sales attrition, uneven product performance. A bold cross-persona vision (requestor, fulfiller, approver, supplier) is the wedge that has to justify the price and out-class the challengers on experience — not a nice-to-have.

3. Who I Work Across, and What They're Pressing For

PM-leader-types (all levels): press for vision; miss that they don't sync across their own levels, so the demo narrative keeps moving and my team burns weeks chasing a "final" that isn't.
Exec-sponsor-types: press for a bold, customer-exciting vision; collapse to "safe / realistic in 6–12 months" the moment constraints appear, and never aligned on what "bold" means in the first place.
The decisive relationship — the dilution chain: exec directives don't reach my design ICs directly. They arrive filtered through IC PM-types who've already chosen safe. By the time work gets made, the bold version is gone — and I'm the only one positioned to see that what's being built no longer matches what the execs think they asked for.

4. How I Sound When I'm at My Sharpest

Funny but very direct. I disarm with humor, then land a blunt, unhedged point that redirects the room in the moment. The humor is what lets the bluntness in.