Head of Experience
Boston
Head of Experience
Boston
Validated traits
Testimonials
Work history
Trove
Amazon
Strange Ventures
VBP Orange
Native Design
fuseproject
Pentagram
Place Lab (formerly Build Public)
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson
Architecture for Humanity
organicARCHITECT
Hugh Huddleson
West Coast Green
Downtown DC Business Improvement District
NIH Innovates
SEP 2026 - PRESENT
Head of Experience
SEP 2026 - PRESENT
What did you do? Across several separate streams of work, I made calls that determined what using Trove feels like on both sides of the exchange. I cut onboarding down to the moment of value instead of a data collection step. I moved validation forward so it reads as the point of the product instead of an afterthought. And I sourced, briefed, and managed the brand engagement that gave the whole thing a settled visual and verbal language (that is uniquely differentiated in this market!), including the naming research that killed terms alpha users were misreading. What changed because of it? Onboarding now completes in a median of under two minutes (1m 53s), with an ~8/10 completion rate from start to finish. And the Polymath font system, the current color palette, and the product nomenclature are what every user is looking at right now, replacing terminology that alpha research showed was actively confusing people (e.g. Ledger reading as blockchain). How did you do it? On onboarding, I killed the "let's set up your account" step and swapped the work-history-and-role fields for a single headline. The role-targeting question was creating a mismatch: someone would pick a path like "establish foundation" and then get asked something that felt like a job application. When we built the supporting intake agent that helps users craft a narrative, I designed the framework to guide those questions (storytelling mixed with behavioral question interview techniques). I decided the form should teach the product by getting someone to their first artifact fast, not by collecting structured data upfront. On validation, the product had it buried behind the artifact creation flow, which worked against Trove's whole thesis. Trove only holds up if the witness feels like the point, not a confirmation step tacked on at the end. I moved it forward in the experience because burying it reads as "trust us" instead of "here's who was there." On the design system, alpha interviews had already surfaced confusion with the terminology and visual hierarchy in use, so I ran research with a few dozen participants to figure out what was and wasn't landing, which is what killed Ledger and reshaped how we talked about Artifact. In parallel, I found, vetted, and onboarded Champions as the design partner, wrote the brief, and managed the relationship through delivery. That's where the typeface system, the palette, and the decision to drop the isometric cube motif all came from.
JUL 2017 - OCT 2025 · 8.3 years
Senior Strategist, Devices Design Group
MAR 2022 - OCT 2025 · 3.7 years
As a design strategist within Amazon’s Device Design Group, my role is to think ahead and move beyond the daily design deliverables that designers ship with partner teams. DDG works across time horizons. Achievements reflect my ability to co-create, build trust, highlight value, and ultimately collaborate across cross-functional leads to deliver product plans on behalf of customers that are rooted in data. Have supported specific programs on establishing design quality and pinpointing GenAI value to customer needs.
The Problem This Was Solving Amazon's Devices & Services Design Group (DDG) ran multiple product lines (Alexa, Fire TV, CoRo, and emerging platforms) on parallel roadmaps with no shared mechanism for leadership to see across them. Design work was being created at every horizon (near term to far term), from immediate H1 delivery to speculative H3 concepts, but no one had a unified view of what was being built, what was being proposed, and how the pieces connected to each other or to the customer. The result was that product and design decisions were made in isolation. Leadership couldn't see the portfolio as a whole. Engineering, product, and design were misaligned on priorities. Partner teams felt excluded from concept development. And perhaps most critically, the customer experience across devices was fragmenting: Alexa, FTV, and ambient platforms were evolving independently without a shared north star. There was no existing mechanism to surface committed versus uncommitted experience work across organizations. We were making strategic bets without a common frame to evaluate them. Phase 1: A Physical Nerve Center The first iteration of the Nerve Center was a physical space (a literal room where D&S leaders and experience makers could walk in and be immersed in the state of DDG's work). The design problem was deceptively hard: how do you translate a sprawling multi-horizon portfolio into something a VP or partner stakeholder can absorb in twenty minutes? I steered the definition, structure, and strategy of what that space would hold and how it would communicate. A three-part framework organized everything into: WHY — the rationale driving concept direction: macro consumer trends, CXOs (Customer Experience Outcomes), research insights, and futures signals. This wasn't decoration. It was the evidence layer that justified what we were building. WHAT — physical prototypes and digital concept illustrations, curated to represent DDG's highest-priority innovation areas. Each required a demo script and instructions; fidelity varied intentionally. HOW — the DDG roadmap and dashboard, showing program distribution across H1/H2/H3 (horizon framework maps short term to long term), resource and budget allocation, and delivery status. The space was designed to create the principle of what the team called "harmony," surfacing where solutions across Alexa, FTV, and other product endpoints were working together and where they were breaking. The Nerve Center made that visible for the first time. Phase 2: Digital Nerve Center As the program matured, teammates developed the framework for the digital parallel: a virtual space and operational mechanism that would keep the same picture alive and updated between physical visits. This involved designing the ingestion and update system, a mechanism that determined how partner teams would feed data in, how it would be evaluated and curated, and how it would flow into what leadership saw. I piloted it across seven flagship device programs that included Fire TV, tablets, and Alexa. We created a core mechanism: Concept Experiences (forecasted) entering via a Readiness Assessment, Launch Experiences (committed) entering via a Value Assessment, both feeding into the Experience Roadmap at the center, and all of it cycling back through a DDG Bi-Annual Experience Gap Analysis. The digital NC was both a communication surface and an operational feedback loop. The Strategic Complexity This wasn't just a design project; it was an alignment project that materialized in both physical and digital forms. The biggest hurdles were organizational rather than conceptual, as tracking other teams' roadmaps and correlating statuses spanned over 24 distinct groups. We knew if teams didn't see their own work reflected in the NC, they would disengage entirely. To solve this, we built a logic system that allowed every team to see exactly how their specific offering fit into the broader portfolio and found common denominators to ensure parity. At the same time, leadership held competing ideas about the NC's actual purpose. Some viewed it as a status reporting tool, while others saw it as a space for design critiques. I maintained steady boundaries, keeping the focus on the fact that the NC was a mechanism for shared understanding, not an operational dashboard. The program was tightly entangled with the physical space, the experience vision, and a third concurrent strategic initiative. The challenge was ensuring all three initiatives could see themselves in the NC's framework without the NC collapsing into any single one of them. Ultimately, working on this project required a constant balance between tracking internal metrics and maintaining focus on the core customer story: what we were solving, who we were solving it for, and how our experiences connected to that answer. The program ran successfully for 18 months and gave cross-functional design leadership a single, unified view of committed and forecasted customer experience work across Alexa, Fire TV, tablet, and EFD, something no existing process had provided. By the end of this period, the physical NC was piloted, the digital framework was fully defined and documented, and the three-component definition, space strategy, and evaluation criteria were all completed. The project was eventually rescoped and ownership was transferred to another team due to shifting organizational priorities and a leadership realignment following a company reorg, rather than any issues with the quality of the work itself.
Senior Researcher, Industrial Design
JUL 2017 - MAR 2022 · 4.8 years
AUG 2024 - AUG 2024 · 1 month
Design Fellow
AUG 2024 - AUG 2024 · 1 month
In the summer of 2024 I was invited to Strange Ventures' inaugural Design Fellowship, a four-week sprint applying ArchetypeAI's NEWTON multi-modal foundation model (a Strange portfolio company in physical AI) to a real industry problem. Healthcare emerged as one of the most promising domains, and [a large international pharmaceutical company] came in as the client. We organized as a three-person team, with me leading research and strategy alongside Greg McNamara (industrial design / CMF) and Qiyu Hu (HCI, UX research). We focused on our client's in vitro diagnostics, specifically the pre-analytical phase: the stretch from a patient's blood draw through transit to the lab. Preexisting research from the client identified this as the part of the diagnostic chain where 62% of sample errors actually occur, including tube-filling errors, patient-ID mismatches, and temperature excursions. The strategic application of AI within this journey remained undefined. I led the work of mapping specific AI capabilities to those known errors, focusing on grounded, commercially viable applications rather than speculative ones: matching what the technology could reliably do today to the failures that mattered most. We developed two separate but connected design concepts ("Somanion"), framed as a roadmap toward a north-star vision of decentralized, real-time-monitored diagnostics. The first was a smart transit system: a tracker that rides with the sample, fusing GPS, temperature, motion, and other sensor inputs to give labs continuous real-time visibility. The second was a desktop base station for sample collection: a peripheral that uses computer vision and multimodal sensing to assist phlebotomists in real time, confirming patient ID and validating tube type. Quiet, supportive automation against a protocol that's complicated and unforgiving. My role as research and strategy lead spanned client stakeholder engagement, opportunity definition, and concept framing. My biggest contribution was taking the client's identified benefits for phlebotomist users (improving accuracy and supporting them through a complicated protocol) and extending that thinking to surface a new value for the patient. I recognized that, for the first time in diagnostic history, these sensing capabilities would enable patients to have transparency into the analysis of their own sample. The same way someone tracks a package, empowering the transport containers with real-time sensing gives patients updates on when their doctors receive results, providing deeper reassurance and peace of mind. That insight reframed the work with the client, moving the concepts from operational improvement into something that mattered directly to future patients. The four-week constraint forced a sharpness that bypassed meandering. Staying in close proximity to the Archetype team kept the strategy grounded in technical reality rather than speculative aspiration. Ultimately, this work was used to validate the client's R&D direction and greenlight further exploration into decentralized diagnostics.
NOV 2015 - JUL 2017 · 1.8 years
Senior Experience Strategist
NOV 2015 - JUL 2017 · 1.8 years
Orange is a team acutely focused on customer experience living within an independent advertising agency. We shape experiences that deepen connections between people and brands by setting strategic vision, designing opportunities that inspire engagement, and driving transformation. Our focus lies with people, at the junction of technology and space. I worked among the strategy team and alongside the creative team to define inspiring and rewarding experiences for specialized brands. » Designed and executed primary research (interviews, analysis, audits) » Mapped out and conducted engaging workshops to debrief client on Phase 1 Discover (research) and bridge to Phase 2 Design » In joining forces with the designers, collaborated on brand-defining spaces and experiences across a range of industries Clients: - Blue Moon Brewery - (NDA) technology company
Blue Moon was opening its first tasting room and restaurant in Denver, and VBP Orange was brought in to define the visitor experience. I was one of two strategists on the project; I was the one working day-to-day with the designer to actually shape the experience — narrative, journey, moments, and the connective tissue between brand and place. In the discover phase, we benchmarked the visitor experience against a wide field of comparable destinations (breweries, distilleries, wineries, and craft food makers from Sierra Nevada to Heath Ceramics) mapping each on dimensions like tour duration and group size, and on a positioning matrix of Tour Guide ↔ Self-Guide × Making ↔ History. That gave us a clear read on where Blue Moon should sit and what tensions it would have to resolve to differentiate. What made this project different was my background. I came in with architectural training and over six years of architecture practice (Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Pentagram) before moving into product and brand strategy. That meant I wasn't just visualizing the space conceptually, I could inhabit it and allow the team to as well. I built the building in CAD to understand how a body moves through a sequence of rooms and pressure-test what a designer's render would actually feel like at human scale. It changed the texture of the proposal: more grounded, more specific, more credible to a client about to commit real capital to a real building. The bar of the work went up because of it. We weren't just pitching a concept, we were proposing a place you could walk through to inhabit the brand. And it was built! Blue Moon's Denver tasting room opened, and the visitor experience strategy we developed shaped what guests actually walked into. Strategy doesn't ship until someone makes it tangible (or in this case, visible). I translated the strategic direction into renderings concrete enough that the client could see the answer, "take the tour" to defend it internally, and rally their team around it, which is how alignment turned into a build. This is one of the projects I point to when I talk about how my architecture background quietly compounds the rest of my practice: strategy gets sharper when you can think about people in space, not just on screens. The design process adjusts and adapts across altitudes. My role: Strategist, day-to-day partner to the designer (competitive landscape, positioning, journey & spatial experience strategy).
APR 2014 - NOV 2015 · 1.7 years
Senior Product Design Strategist
APR 2014 - NOV 2015 · 1.7 years
Native is an integrated design company dedicated to delivering holistic product and interaction design solutions for the world's most exciting brands. With core competencies across varied platforms — business strategies, research and consumer insights, technologies selection and connected solutions — Native achieves holistic UX design that encapsulates collaborative, multidisciplinary design. » As one of the founding team members to open the San Francisco studio, my responsibilities centered on being nimble and hands-on » Worked alongside the business development team in London HQ (specifically working to translate approaches to the targeted Silicon Valley market) » Led research in-field and in-studio to develop design directions for the product (industrial design) team » Assembled narratives for client-facing design concept presentations » Discovered and defined insights to inform design development Clients: - HP Immersive Computing - HP Advanced Platforms - (NDA) global leader in POS terminal systems - (NDA) luxury smart watch startup
At Native Design, this project was the first opportunity in my career to own primary research end-to-end as a design strategist. The brief from our POS client was substantive: their internal design team was rolling out new capabilities across security, usability, and accessibility, and they needed to establish a new design language that would enable progression across the entire family line for visual consistency, improve user experience, and evolve their design principles. They came to Native for the research foundation to make those decisions with confidence. I led a six-month research initiative across the point-of-sale ecosystem, combining stakeholder, customer, and in-store interviews with market trend analysis. I then synthesized the findings into a strategic framework that moved the design team from raw insights to prioritized opportunity areas and clear execution. I was the only researcher and strategist on the team, working alongside a project manager, a biz-dev lead, a UI/UX designer, and three industrial designers. That structure meant I owned the full research arc: scoping research questions with the client, recruiting and interviewing participants, going out in field, doing the analysis, and translating findings into something the designers could pick up and run with. This project shaped how I think about strategy work to this day. It was the first time I felt the full weight of being the bridge between users and the design team, making sure their voice didn't get lost between research deck and final product. The methodology I used here (qualitative interviews → thematic synthesis → applied framework, layered with market and tech context) became a template I've returned to across nearly every project since. My role: Sole design strategist and researcher (research design, fieldwork, market/tech synthesis, framework, design team handoff).
MAY 2013 - APR 2014 · 1 year
Design Strategist
MAY 2013 - APR 2014 · 1 year
fuseproject is an industrial design and branding firm that seamlessly collaborates across many disciplines and is able to engage from ideation (opportunity identification and definition) through execution (strategic research, design, development). Teams are focused on distilling brands to their core in order to cultivate emotional connections through storytelling. » First position as a strategist » Applied passion for and interest in design to established research abilities to develop insights on brand positioning and product development » Applied strategic frameworks to finding new market spaces, competitive landscape analysis and futurescaping » Devised, analyzed and interpreted research in many verticals (consumer electronics, home wares, health and beauty, humanitarian) » Served domestic and international clients » Formulated narratives for presentations and visual storytelling » Worked effectively and efficiently under tight time frames and schedules Clients: - PayPal - Nike Foundation (The Girl Effect) - Nivea
JUL 2012 - MAY 2013 · 11 months
Architectural Designer
JUL 2012 - MAY 2013 · 11 months
Pentagram was founded on the premise of collaboration between interdisciplinary designers and has five offices internationally. The San Francisco studio focuses on architectural design, retail interiors and exhibition space. Pentagram’s deep-rooted proficiency in brand fostered a conversation between the identity development (logo, brand guidelines and standards) developed in the New York studio and the physical articulation and embodiment executed in the San Francisco studio. » Researched, selected, and implemented materials and architectural elements based on client’s brand strategies » Created 2D/3D visuals (renderings) to express designs » Generated diagrams and other visual content for design development and construction » Paired to strategically define a 4-phased process to rollover evolved franchise branding across thousands of US locations Clients: - WeightWatchers - M&T Bank - private client corporate HQ
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SEP 2011 - SEP 2012 · 1.1 years
Program Development Associate
SEP 2011 - SEP 2012 · 1.1 years
Build Public (formerly UP), is a non-profit development organization conceived by the Build Inc. partners. It was established as a mission-based horizontal development firm, which works to maximize social, economic and/or environmental returns to the public. Build Public works in partnership with public agencies and the private market. Build Public's access to emerging social capital funds and socially responsible investment markets distinguishes it from for-profit developers. By reducing the cost of funds for the entitlement process and leveraging the lower return expectations over the life of a project, UP’s use of social capital allows it to utilize a longer-term horizon than conventional developers and to help the public retain a larger share of the value created by the entitlements. » Assisted identity branding design » Supported team in initiatives for new business partnerships » Assisted in RFP production » Built website 1.0
JUN 2007 - SEP 2011 · 4.3 years
Architectural Designer
JUN 2007 - SEP 2011 · 4.3 years
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson is an award-winning architecture firm that has grown to five offices around the US, with refined specialization in a plethora of fields, from high-end residential to academic to public to retail. BCJ emphasizes the importance of and relationship between place and materials. The majority of my tenure focused on Apple flagship retail stores, but began initially working with the team designing the Digital Arts Research Center at UC Santa Cruz. » Initially aided in RFP/RFQ production, marketing asset development and construction administration » With greater experience, grew to production drawings » Created 2D/3D visuals (renderings) to express designs
SEP 2006 - SEP 2009 · 3.1 years
Designer
SEP 2006 - SEP 2009 · 3.1 years
Architecture for Humanity pioneered a new model for the application of design, specifically architectural, to humanitarian crises. It was a non-profit focused on architectural interventions and resolutions for various definitions of ‘disaster’ around the world. Our chapter in San Francisco led the research and design of a sustainable community design project in collaboration with the Mayor's Office of San Francisco, MTA, Federal EPA, SF Redevelopment Agency, and the Residents of the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. This was a 5 year project to rethink and redesign the use and meaning of a neighborhood open to improvement. Our new approach was rooted in first-hand research and community organization. The success of this implemented proposal on Newcomb Avenue brought 16 additional Model Blocks to San Francisco neighborhoods. » Winner of Federal EPA funding » Winner of the Mayor's Office CCG Grant 2007, 2008 » Winner of Wells Fargo Community Sponsorship
JAN 2006 - DEC 2007 · 2 years
Intern, LEED Consultant
JAN 2006 - DEC 2007 · 2 years
organicARCHITECT began in San Francisco as a boutique architecture firm intending to spread the gospel of responsible and sustainable “green” building. » Researched materials for specification » Client consultation » Procured and produced LEED certification documents
SEP 2006 - JUN 2007 · 10 months
Model Builder
SEP 2006 - JUN 2007 · 10 months
Hugh Huddleson is an independent architect focusing on an international swath of luxury residential and hospitality projects. » Built site and project models - mostly museum board construction - from drawing sets
JAN 2006 - DEC 2006 · 1 year
Volunteer
JAN 2006 - DEC 2006 · 1 year
MAY 2005 - AUG 2005 · 4 months
Transportation Intern
MAY 2005 - AUG 2005 · 4 months
» Designed and executed transportation studies on bicycle usage along high-traffic commuter corridors » Aided team in inaugural launch of "Circulator" bus (marketing, PR)
JUN 2001 - JUN 2002 · 1.1 years
Histology Technician
JUN 2001 - JUN 2002 · 1.1 years
Other Artifacts
This event was the first time my personal interests and professional experience were able to coalesce and I loved it. Age Of_ was conceived out of that overlap. This event was the first (and at the time only) SF Design Week event around aging and it was graciously hosted at IDEO's SF HQ. I had been studying co-design methods with and building products for older adults for nearly a decade and through conversations with Rahmin Eslami and Elysia Syriac (the other folks in Age Of_), identified an opportunity to shift the conversation around aging and design. While most industry dialogue focused narrowly on accessibility and decline, the Age Of_ team recognized a design gap (and a market opportunity) to explore aging through lenses of identity, culture, and aspiration. I conceived the idea to launch "Age Of_" as a flagship workshop at SF Design Week, bringing together designers to reimagine what it means to design for this demographic. Our team was multidisciplinary: experience and community designer, creative director, and strategic forecaster, Julian Bleecker. Together we built an aging-specific curriculum and facilitation guide, adapting Julian's own design fiction techniques into a compressed 90-minute workshop format. The methodology centered on a "mad lib" style exercise using prompt cards across five dimensions (living with, human need, form, action, and attribute) that guided teams to brainstorm solutions for older adults through exploratory prototyping. On the day of the event, I delivered a baseline presentation on opportunities in aging design and guiding participants through the exercises and prototype development. We 3D-printed branded pen holders for the requisite brainstorming sharpies and printed some inspirational quotes around aging on cards to get brains warmed up. There were beautiful images of older adults doing every day activities to set the context of the space. The workshop exceeded all expectations, drawing over 70 participants against a planned capacity of 25. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with several participants noting it was the first time they'd encountered aging discussed through a lens of possibility rather than limitation. The room came alive during both the introductory presentation where the universal relevance of aging resonated across the audience and during the team share-outs. The curriculum we developed was intended to become the foundation for an ongoing workshop series, establishing a new framework for how designers approach this underserved and high-potential market.
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