I'm the VP of Design at SimplePractice, the electronic health record (EHR) platform that over 250,000 independent health and wellness practitioners run their practices on. Before this I held design leadership roles at Spotify, Intuit, Facebook, and Yahoo, most of them on the business tools side: ad platforms, design systems, and the software companies run on. I also advise startups in fintech and food.
SimplePractice2023 – Present
SimplePractice is the all-in-one, HIPAA-compliant platform that over 250,000 health and wellness practitioners, most of them solo or small-group, use to run their practices: telehealth, online booking, clinical documentation, billing and autopay. I joined to set the design vision for the product and to build the organization that could deliver it, across clinical care, revenue cycle, mobile and an emerging AI practice.
Spotify2021 – 2023
Led design and research for Spotify Advertising, a 64-person organization across product design, research, content design and program management, building the tools advertisers and podcast publishers use to buy and run campaigns across Spotify's audio inventory.
Intuit2019 – 2021
Led design systems and accessibility across TurboTax, QuickBooks, ProConnect and Mint, with a 12-person team of designers, UX engineers and program managers. The job was to define one design system for the whole company, the One Intuit Design System, and to get it adopted.
2019
A fractional role covering every creative function at once: product design, customer research, the office environment and the corporate brand.
Facebook2017 – 2019
Led an 18-person team of artists, writers, filmmakers, strategists and producers telling Facebook's story to marketers and advertisers, and ran Studio X, the in-house creative agency for Facebook's business products.
Facebook2014 – 2017
Led the product design teams behind Facebook's advertising platform. As head of the "Outcomes" team, I ran design for the tools advertisers use from targeting and audience building through campaign reporting and measurement, and I grew Facebook's Business Design standards from a skunkworks effort into a cross-functional team with global engineering support.
Yahoo2010 – 2014
Head of Design for Yahoo's ads and data products worldwide, a 38-person team across Sunnyvale, New York and Bangalore. I was on the original team that designed and built Yahoo! Gemini, the company's native and search ad platform.
2004 – 2010
Co-founded the company and owned its design and front-end development, from the website and product UI to the B2B and marketing materials, and worked directly with the agencies representing major brands.
Begin every interaction with a human connection.
Listen more than you speak, and let logic and data drive the decision.
Take on hard problems expecting to learn from them.
Learn from the past and keep the team moving forward.
Change is the one constant in this industry, so plan on it.
Business software should help people get better at their jobs. Inline training and help matter more here than in consumer products, and getting people to adopt best practices they may not understand yet is a big part of the work.
Consumer products chase engagement, and workplace tools chase efficiency: take the repetition out of a task and you save everyone time and money. Efficiency can't come at the expense of what the person is using the tool for, though.
Business products carry complexity that has to be respected. Simplify too little and people struggle, and simplify too much and you lose the value the product exists to provide.
Accuracy and predictability are table stakes for business products. Companies spend money and staff time on the tools we make, and if they can't count on the results, that money goes elsewhere.
I speak on design leadership, AI's impact on design organizations and design ethics, at keynotes, on panels and on podcasts. A few recent ones:
Upscale Conference keynote on how new AI input modalities are changing design organizations, with examples of AI UX work that shipped
Panel discussions on Creative Operations (Creative Agility, Los Angeles) and design's impact on cafe culture (Academic Coffee podcast)
Podcast interview, Unserious, on my move from engineer to designer and how visual storytelling shapes a company's culture.
Guest Lecturer, Pratt Institute - "Decoding the Interview", plus "Lessons in Creativity" presentations at Spotify's "The Opening Act" HBCU/HSI roadshow
Podcast interview, Now What Podcast by Wix, on how brands reach listeners through audio, what’s next in podcasting, and what changes when you design for enterprise and B2B.
