My Story
Dad. Husband. Nerd. Lover of art, bikes, food, & foam-dart blasters.
Outside of work, life revolves around my family. Most of my energy goes into making memories with my wife and kids: bike rides, backyard foam-dart battles, whatever the weekend turns into. I notice design everywhere, from architecture to cars. I read science fiction and some fantasy, play retro games on old Game Boys and a Steam Deck, and play Cairn (opens in a new tab), a simpler cousin of D&D. And I like helping people, at home and at work.
Over 15 years. One company. Six job levels.
I started as a contractor in 2009, designing for email and the web. Two years in, I converted to a full-time senior associate and became the second designer on Capital One's first mobile app, then grew into leading design on the iOS app for several years. From there I built a team focused on helping associates experiment with smarter messaging, and I'm now leading the team rebuilding the tooling behind our entire messaging stack.
Along the way, I worked up through every level to Director, across four business lines, seven managers, and more reorgs than I can count. That arc isn't an accident. It's what happens when you keep running toward hard problems and messy organizations.
2018–Present
Built from a team of one after a major reorg. Two designers had helped get APEX off the ground on the side of their desks before I arrived as its first design leader. There was no inherited playbook, and no design team, so I built one from scratch and hired up from there. As the mandate grew from one experimentation platform into a full marketing-stack overhaul, that same team became what's now Martech Design.
One example: we wanted ML rules that weighed how urgent a message was to a customer, not just how likely someone was to click it (what's now APEX's urgency score). A data scientist sent back a white paper full of dense math as the answer. One of our designers said, "I don't understand any of this. I went to art school." We got there anyway, with storytelling and metaphors.
We're still figuring a lot of it out.
2011–2018
Our product and dev partners sat in Northern Virginia; we sat in Richmond. So we split the travel hours between us to make sure design always had a voice in the room. It built real bonds (not just with each other, but with our partners) and everyone started investing in the quality of the app.
We'd read the App Store reviews together, typical and unhinged alike, hunting for the moments our app made something easier for someone. Those moments made us better.
My team and I learned a lot.