Decide what to solve before engineering builds it.
Fractional product and design leadership for developer tools, infrastructure, and AI companies.
Your team already knows how to ship. I help you make sure you are solving the right problem before engineering spends weeks building the wrong thing.
Start with a 45-minute conversation about one problem. We will look at where users are getting stuck, what you know, what you are assuming, and what is worth investigating next.
Telemetry tells you where users fall off. It cannot tell you why.
Your signups are not always turning into active users. Your team is shipping AI experiences nobody has designed before. Product, engineering, and design are making judgment calls every week about what to build, how it should work, and which problems actually matter.
For Series B and C teams with one or two designers and no senior design leader, those decisions often get made without enough customer evidence or time to step back and see the whole experience.
That is where I come in.
I work directly with your customers and product team to find the moments where trust breaks, separate usability noise from the problems worth solving, and turn those insights into product direction and designed solutions.
Wrong bets cost the same engineering weeks as right ones.
If a developer signs up and never reaches first value, you already paid to acquire someone who may never come back.
If an AI feature behaves in a way users do not understand or trust, your team pays again through support, rework, and slower adoption.
And if you keep fixing symptoms instead of the underlying problem, the same friction keeps showing up release after release.
The goal is not simply a better interface.
It is fewer engineering cycles spent solving the wrong problem, more users reaching value, and clearer evidence behind what gets built next.
One problem. Forty-five minutes. No cost.
Tell me about the part of the product that is not working the way you expected: where users are dropping off, what you have tried, and what you think may be happening.
No presentation or screen share required.
We will separate what you know from what you are assuming and determine whether the problem is worth investigating further.
If there is a fit, I will recommend the next step, which may include a deeper review of the product or Experience Audit.
When the problem is deeper than one conversation.
The Experience Audit is typically a four-week engagement designed to show you where the experience is breaking, why it is happening, and what to do about it.
What happens
Align on the outcome
We define the business and customer outcome that matters and agree on how we will measure improvement.
Map the critical journeys
We identify the most important user flows, where you believe they break, and the assumptions your team is currently making.
Watch real customers use the product
I recruit, screen, schedule, and run recorded sessions with your target users, including people who are new to the product and people who signed up but never activated.
Find the patterns behind the friction
I separate isolated usability issues from the two or three underlying problems creating the majority of the experience breakdown.
Design the fixes
I turn the evidence into a prioritized roadmap and design the highest-impact solutions so your engineering team has something concrete to build.
What you receive
Your team’s time: approximately four hours across the engagement.
Sometimes the problem is bigger than the product flow.
When a team needs ongoing senior design leadership, I embed with founders and executive teams two to three days a week.
- Product and experience strategy
- Design leadership and operating model
- Hiring and team development
- Design quality and critique
- Customer evidence and measurement
- AI product strategy and interaction models
- Partnership across Product and Engineering
The audit tells us what is happening.
Embedded leadership helps the organization build the capability to keep making better decisions after the audit is over.
Twenty years leading design for complex technical products.
Most recently, I led design for Intuit’s Developer Platform, the tooling behind products including QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mailchimp.
Before Intuit, I led design across Google Cloud, Amazon, and Microsoft.
My career has focused on the same kind of problem Design for Direction solves today: making highly technical systems understandable and useful to the people on the other side.
I serve on design advisory boards at Ohio State and the University of Washington.
I make complexity human.
I can work with the engineers building the system and stay equally focused on the person trying to use it.
That combination is the work.
You already have speed. Make sure it is pointed at the right problem.
Bring one problem.
In 45 minutes, we will look at what is happening, what you know, and what is worth investigating next.