UX & PRODUCT DESIGN LEADER

20 YEARS · GOOGLE · CIRIUM · AMERICAN AIRLINES · FEDEX · NEUTROGENA · HONEYWELL · VIASAT

Behavior doesn't lie. I build from there.

My practice sits at the intersection where I think on multiple levels simultaneously: experience, systems, behavior, trust, strategy, and the humans the work is ultimately for. Not because those are trendy, but because the products and the organizations that build with them, hold up over time.

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Selected work across industries and impact.

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Studies

Deep dives into strategy, process, and outcomes.

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Design
Leadership

Building teams. Shaping vision. Driving results.

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SUBSTACK NEW

My Thinking
Matters

The most useful skill in the AI era isn't prompting. It's knowing how to read a response.

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WHAT MATTERS TO ME

Staying Human is a Practice.

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Five modes of how teams work — thinking, relating, making, knowing, and deciding — shown as overlapping circles of people at work

20 YEARS IN THE ROOM The work is always about the people.

STAYING
HUMAN IS
A PRACTICE

My work sits at the intersection of behavioral design and AI trust. That's not a positioning statement. It's a description of what I can't stop thinking about.

Most of the conversation about AI in organizations focuses on capability, speed, and integration. Those are real and important questions. They're not the only ones.

There's a quieter question underneath them. What happens to the people inside the organization when AI becomes the default cognitive tool? What happens to judgment, to creative instinct, to the capacity for genuine decision-making, when the friction that produces those things gets systematically removed?

Something gets skipped. And what gets skipped consistently, atrophies. That's not a metaphor. That's how cognition works.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE ORGANIZATIONS I WORK WITH

This isn't a philosophical concern held separately from my design practice. It's structural to it.

When I evaluate an AI integration, I'm not only asking whether it works. I'm asking what it does to the people using it over time. Whether it builds capacity or quietly borrows against it. Whether the design decisions, the interaction patterns, the data model, the copy, hold the principle the organization says it cares about. Whether the product is making its users more capable or more dependent.

Most organizations integrating AI are not asking those questions at the design level. They're asking them, if at all, at the policy level. A disclaimer that covers something is not the same as a system that doesn't need the disclaimer.

The design leader you hire to integrate AI into your product function should be able to hold that distinction. Not as an ethical add-on. As a structural design competency.

That's the work I do. And it has direct implications for your customers, your product reputation, and the long-term trust your organization is building or eroding right now, one interaction pattern at a time.

THE FIVE PLACES IT SHOWS UP

This displacement doesn't stay in the lane you first notice it in. It spreads across five specific areas of human function.

MAKING

Every time someone builds, draws, or crafts something through sustained contact with resistant material, their brain runs a process no shortcut replicates. Aesthetic judgment. Iterative error-correction. The perceptual capacity to know when something is wrong before you can explain why. When AI produces the output without the process, the artifact exists. The development doesn't happen.

THINKING

The layer of cognition that activates before real thinking begins — the willingness to sit with a question, the tolerance for not-knowing — is bypassed by design. AI is built for speed and fluency. The cognitive stamina that only comes through use doesn't develop in its absence.

KNOWING

You can discuss a topic accurately and at length without understanding anything about it. AI makes that easier than it has ever been. Genuine understanding requires sustained engagement with hard material, the willingness to be confused, the slow accumulation of insight that only arrives after enough cognitive work has been done.

RELATING

Real human connection has always required discomfort. The risk of being misunderstood. The work of staying present with someone whose needs complicate your own. When a frictionless alternative is always available, the capacity for that work quietly diminishes.

DECIDING

Every real decision runs a cognitive process that clarifies what you believe. When that process gets outsourced, the output may improve. The development of judgment doesn't happen. Over time, the capacity for independent thinking diminishes in ways that are hard to see until you need it.

My Thinking Matters is the publication where I work through this in full. Not what AI is doing to the world. What it's doing to the people inside it, and what to do about that.

READ IT AT MYTHINKINGMATTERS.SUBSTACK.COM ↗

Behavior doesn't lie. I build from there.

Port­folio

CaseStudies

DesignLeadership

My ThinkingMatters

Staying Human is a Practice.

Portfolio

Case
Studies

Design
Leadership

My Thinking
Matters