How I build teams
Hiring is the most important design decision I make.
I build teams around complementary strengths, not clones of myself. Researchers who love the messy questions, designers who show their work early and often, and people who disagree with me out loud. Then I set clear priorities and the purpose behind them, give feedback that's specific, timely, and actionable, and get out of the way. At Shopify I built the support design team's research practice from scratch and tripled the number of designers on the team, which shipped at a pace few teams in the company matched, across two products.
Cross-functional collaboration
The best design work happens shoulder to shoulder with people who aren't designers.
The best products I've shipped never came from design working alone. I pull in product, engineering, sales, data analysts, and frontline support early, listen to the people closest to the problem, and let what they know sharpen the work. Then design does what design does: takes all of it and shapes the answer. Collaboration means every voice informs the work, not that every hand is on the pen.
Creating a vision
A vision is only useful if the team can navigate by it.
I don't write vision decks that live in a drive. I build a picture of where we're going that's concrete enough to make Tuesday's decision easier: what we say no to, what great looks like, what we measure. I run direction on three horizons at once: what we're shipping now, what we're derisking next, and the bigger bet the first two are building toward. The test of a vision isn't how it demos, it's whether it turns into shipped product and users who'd miss it.
Design for the business
The best business cases are built out of customer truths.
Companies don't struggle to set goals, they struggle to connect them to what customers actually want. That translation runs both ways, and I work in both directions. I take what researchers, frontline teams, and customers themselves know and turn it into strategy the business can act on: which problems are worth solving and what solving them is worth. And when the business hands me a number to move, I find the customer experience that moves it, so the revenue target ships as something people are glad to use. Either direction, the job is the same: make the win mutual.
Growing people
My job is making sure the team's best work is ahead of them.
Feedback in my teams is specific, frequent, and safe to give back to me. I match people to problems that stretch them, put their names on the work, and push researchers and designers alike toward owning decisions, not just deliverables. The measure of my leadership is what my team does when I'm not in the room.