I’ve always believed that great leadership starts with hiring exceptional people, but it doesn’t stop there. Leadership is an active job: setting clear direction, coaching people to advance their craft, and creating the conditions where they can do the best work of their careers.
Hire for talent. Empower for impact.
When I build a team, I look for strong thinking, genuine curiosity, and craft. People who care deeply about the work and have a point of view. Once they’re in, I work alongside each person to sharpen their skills, help them develop as individuals, and coach them through the challenges that lead to real growth. That also means actively clearing organizational and process barriers so the team can operate at full effectiveness. I run regular critique sessions to keep everyone moving in the same direction, grounded in a shared strategy that connects to what the business actually needs.
Design earns its seat at the table.
Design earns its place by making things work, for users and for the business. In my work on HP’s subscription services, design decisions were directly tied to enrollment conversion rates, retention outcomes, and customer comprehension. Subscription design demands a real understanding of conversion psychology: why a customer commits, what makes them stay, and what triggers the decision to leave. I’ve led design across the full subscriber lifecycle, from enrollment flows built to convert and onboarding experiences that establish value quickly, to account dashboards that reinforce that value over time and cancellation flows built to reduce churn without manipulation. If a design choice can’t be connected to a user need or a business outcome, it’s worth asking why we’re making it.
The best ideas come from the whole table.
Some of the best design decisions I’ve been part of didn’t start in design. They started in a conversation with a product manager, a data analyst, or someone in customer support who knew something we didn’t. I work hard to build teams that treat cross-functional collaboration as a core part of the process. Design touches almost every other discipline, and keeping those connections strong is something I take seriously.
Part of that is making sure the right voices are actually heard. The loudest people in any room aren’t always the ones with the best ideas. I actively look for the person who hasn’t spoken yet and find a way to draw them in. The insight that changes a direction often comes from someone who didn’t think their perspective counted.
Let research lead.
I’ve seen what happens when teams skip the research and trust their instincts. Sometimes it works. More often, they spend months building the wrong thing. I’ve learned to treat user research as an ongoing input that keeps the work honest, not just a checkpoint at the start of a project. Research doesn’t make decisions for you. It helps make sure the decisions you do make aren’t built on assumptions you could have tested.
Transparency builds trust. Trust enables everything else.
I run my teams with high transparency. That means being open about priorities, honest about tradeoffs, and clear about why decisions get made, even when the answer isn’t what people were hoping for. Integrity shows up in how you operate day to day. Teams that trust their leadership spend less energy on politics and more energy on work.
Stay close to the craft.
I’ve managed large teams across complex programs, but I stay engaged with design decisions at a meaningful level. Staying close to the work helps me stay useful. When I give feedback, I try to make it specific enough to actually help. “Make it feel more premium” doesn’t give anyone anything to work with. Specificity is how you raise the bar.
That includes how I run critique. The questions a moderator asks, the tone they set, the way they create space for quieter voices: these are design decisions in their own right. I’ve spent a lot of time getting this right, and I think the way a design leader runs those sessions says a lot about what they actually value.
Treat people well. Always.
This one should go without saying, but it doesn’t. I invest in the people on my team: their growth, their visibility, their sense of ownership. I try to create an environment where people feel safe to take risks and comfortable enough to say when something isn’t working. The teams I’ve been proudest of operated with kindness and trust, and in doing so, exceeded expectations.