About

This moment feels like the early web to me. Nothing has settled yet, and the people willing to build are the ones who get to decide what it becomes. So I'm building. By day I lead AI-first design teams. On my own time and my own hardware, I have created an integrated intelligence platform: frontier models for hard architectural thinking with a small fleet of local GPUs for daily production. I built it end to end because running AI at every level, from provisioning the GPUs to auditing the model's judgment, is what turns enthusiasm into rigor. That rigor now shapes how my teams deliver and what I trust AI to do.

I've been building since the late '90s, when that meant rolling your own CMS before WordPress existed. At Harpo I built a tool in Visio because I needed a better way to connect wireframes to requirements. At GE Capital I started a skunkworks pattern library for my team, and it spread until the whole enterprise had adopted it. The platform I run now is the same instinct with better tools.

Operating it daily is its own education. A language model grading a rubric will anchor on its first answer and repeat it, so every question gets its own pass. I log the model's calls against my own to watch for drift, and a human review is what makes any of it count. Latency turned out to be a design material like any other; I set response budgets and put system prompts on diets until they fit.

I've spent three decades in this industry, most of them leading. I led design at 18F, the federal government's in-house digital consultancy under the General Services Administration, and built and scaled teams at GE Capital and Agile Defense. The federal years left artifacts I'm proud to have been part of: the U.S. Web Design System, the 18F Method Cards, and a hand in what became the 21st Century IDEA Act.

Most of my career has been inside organizations in the middle of becoming something else: an ad agency deciding it needed UX, a federal government building human-centered design capability, teams positioning as AI-native before the industry agreed what that meant. That work depends on discovery, the craft I sharpened at Jeffrey Zeldman's Happy Cog: getting to the right problem before anyone starts solving it, and bringing people along so the answer holds. Somebody inside wants the change to be real, and my job is making it stick.

I've co-authored six books on UX and design leadership. I've presented a few hundred talks and facilitated workshops over the better part of a decade. These days that side of me runs through Chicago Camps, producing events because the community gets stronger when we learn in the same room.

The books are below, including one that's still a manuscript and better than its unfinished state has any right to be. They're also the brain behind the question box, so if you have something to ask them, go ahead. And if you'd rather see the work than read about it, it's all on the Builds page.