At Instacart, I oversee experience strategy across Fulfillment and Instacart for Business, spanning roughly ten product subteams. I lead a team of designers and partner closely with Product and Engineering leaders, staying involved in the work while helping teams make consequential product decisions.
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Order quality is one of Instacart’s most important company-wide outcomes, with many teams influencing whether customers receive what they ordered. I led the design direction across those efforts, helping teams work toward a cohesive end-to-end experience while advancing a major business priority.
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As AI changes what’s possible in product development, I’ve been leading changes to how our design team works. That has included evolving our workflows and operating practices, and rethinking how we collaborate with Product and Engineering to make decisions and validate experiences earlier.
View Case StudyDesigners create representations of the intended experience
Designers shape, validate, and improve the experience itself
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At InVision, I led design for 0-1 design systems products, defined an ambitious platform vision and guided a fundamental product pivot. I helped align the organization around that direction and led a distributed team in bringing the redesigned experience to market.
View Case StudyI want designers involved while a product direction can still change. I help them build the judgment to challenge assumptions and make hard decisions alongside their Product and Engineering partners. Staying close to the work lets me help turn those decisions into a real experience.
I expect designers to challenge product strategy, and I expect Product and Engineering to push on design decisions too. The work gets better when everyone feels responsible for the experience and comfortable questioning an idea, regardless of where it came from.
An early design can make a strategic question easier to discuss. I use exploration to open up the options, and research when we need evidence to move past competing opinions. Sometimes I need to push hard on a direction. Other times, I can help another designer lead the conversation.
Before we put a lot of design time into something, I want to be clear about the problem and what would tell us we're on the right track. I like ambitious ideas, and I want to test the parts we're least sure about before we commit to them.
A strategy can sound convincing until you see it in a real interaction. I stay close to critique and validation because that's where we find out whether the details really work for someone using the product.
I try to be specific about expectations and give feedback people can use. I also want designers to have the confidence to make calls themselves, without waiting for me to weigh in on everything.
Some expectations sound clear until people have to apply them. When I see that happening, I try to give people something useful to work from, whether it's guidance on growing as a designer or knowing what to bring to a review. Several of these approaches started with my team and were shared more widely.
I wanted designers to have a clearer sense of what growth looked like in their actual work.
I wrote level-by-level guidance so designers could use our competency framework in conversations about growth, then kept it current as the framework changed.
I put together a guide to what strong craft looks like in everyday design work and how expectations change as designers grow.
The framework outlines four ways to influence decisions, with guidance on when each is useful and a self-assessment for designers.
We needed reviews and project processes that people could use without guessing what was expected.
I made the purpose of each review clearer, including what designers should bring and which decisions the conversation needed to support.
I wrote playbooks for strategic work, iterative projects and internal pitches so teams knew whom to involve along the way.
I clarified when a project needed input from our Head of Design, and what kind of feedback would be useful at that point.
A few things that helped my team turned out to be useful for other design leads, too.
I dug into survey trends and cross-functional benchmarks, then shared the approach with other design leads.
I mapped upcoming work against the design experience each area needed, and used that to inform staffing decisions.
For performance calibration, I paired examples of designers' work with specific evidence of impact. The format was later used more broadly.
I've put a lot of attention into the day-to-day experience of being on the team. Clear expectations and real opportunities to grow matter to me, as does making sure good work gets recognized. Over three annual surveys, the engagement results have improved substantially.
Favorable team engagement, 2024–2026
Percentage-point improvement across three annual surveys
Percentage-point improvement since 2025
Percentage points above the design org average
Voluntary attrition over the past three years
No one on my team has left voluntarily during that period.
I’m based in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Penn State University’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. My career has taken me across financial services, small-business software, design tools, and commerce, which has given me a pretty broad perspective on the kinds of problems design can help solve.
I’ve also experienced a wide range of company environments, including large public companies, an agency, a startup, and fast-growing pre-IPO businesses. I do my best work with people who are curious, willing to question familiar approaches, and genuinely working toward a shared goal across Design, Product, and Engineering.
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Over the past year, I've been designing and building Ledge & Tide, a vacation home on Deer Isle, Maine. I created the brand from scratch and redesigned the house from top to bottom to create a comfortable, authentic Maine experience rooted in its setting. From the website to the rooms and the smallest guest details, I've looked for ways to help visitors connect with what makes this part of the coast special.
It's been an opportunity to shape an experience people actually inhabit. The same thing draws me to digital product design: thinking through how the pieces work together and seeing how those choices feel to someone on the receiving end.
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