My Story

Dad. Husband. Nerd. Lover of art, bikes, food, & Nerf.

Outside of work, I'm mostly trying to keep up with my family, ride my bike, and lose gracefully at Nerf. The same curiosity that drives my design work shows up everywhere else too. I'm usually in the middle of a book, a hobby, a new show, or all of the above.

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. I was APEX's first designer, starting from scratch with no inherited playbook. I hired up from there, and 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.