Design for Direction

The shift

AI made making things look good free. It didn't make building the right thing any easier.

Teams now ship fast and discover the polish was hiding the real questions, the ones a tool can't answer for you.

What's commoditized

Fast prototypes that all look the same. Hero images and user journeys AI can generate in minutes. The clean, modern UI. AI is genuinely good at all of it now, so the artifact is no longer where the value lives.

What's scarce

Knowing the right problem to solve, for the right customer and the real users, and how to make it hold up at scale. That's judgment and direction, not decoration. It's the expensive part, and it's what I do.

How I help

Three ways in: start small, go deeper when it's working.

Every engagement answers three questions a tool can't: Are you building the right thing? Does it actually work? Where is it costing you?

Start here

Product & UX Teardown

~1 week · fixed fee

I go through your product and your data and tell you where the experience breaks, whether you're even solving the right problem, and what it's costing you in conversion and rework, with the numbers to back every claim.

When “it feels off” but no one can name why

Most common Project sprint

Direction & Redesign Sprints

2–6 weeks · scoped fee

Early teams: problem framing, personas, and ruthless prioritization so you build the right thing first. Scaling teams: ground-up information architecture and journey mapping across your ecosystem when a redesign is bigger than your team can carry.

Series A direction · Series B–C redesigns

Ongoing

Embedded Design Leadership

2–3 days/week · monthly

Senior judgment in the room. I set design direction, own the hard product calls, get design, engineering, and PM working together, and measure results against a baseline, without the 9-month, $400K search for a full-time VP of Design.

When you need a design leader, not just hands

Proof, not opinions

I make design legible to the people who fund it, with numbers.

Outcomes from leading design at FAANG-scale organizations. The floor, not the ceiling. Earlier-stage teams usually have more room to gain.

40%

faster delivery after redesigning how design and engineering worked together.

93%

AI-tool adoption across 400+ designers, an enablement program measured, not mandated.

−5 → +51

team NPS turnaround, the operating model behind faster, better work.

How it works

I find the real problem, then I show you how to fix and scale it.

01 · Listen

Talk to real users

A focused round of qualitative interviews surfaces the actual problem, the one hiding underneath a polished UI and a working demo.

02 · Judge

Find the right problem

Senior judgment on the questions a tool can't answer: is this the right problem, the right customer, the right flow? Most teams are racing to build something that shouldn't exist yet.

03 · Direct

Recommend and scale

Clear recommendations on what to fix, what to cut, and how to scale it to meet your business goals. Direction you can act on, not a deck of opinions.

Taurean Jones

Principal, Design for Direction

Design leadership at Google Cloud, Intuit & Amazon
Enabled 400+ designers to adopt AI (93%)
$60B TAM unlocked at Google Cloud
Board roles: Ohio State · UW iSchool
20+ years across DevOps, Cloud, data & fintech

About

I've spent two decades on the inside of the products you compete with.

I led design organizations at Google Cloud, Intuit, and Amazon, the technical, high-stakes products you and I both know break in the same places. I'm not a visual designer for hire. I bring the senior product judgment most startups can't justify hiring full-time: the thinking that decides what to build, whether it works, and how design, engineering, and PM move together to ship it.

Design for Direction is exactly what the name says: design as direction-setting, not decoration. In an era where anyone can generate something that looks good, that judgment is the part that still has to be earned.

Are you solving the right problem, or just shipping visual slop? Let's find out.

A free 30-minute consult. I'll give you an honest read on where your product or design org actually stands, and whether I'm the right person to help. No pitch deck.

Book a free 30-min consult →

Prefer email? taurean@designfordirection.com