I'm a Senior UX Designer and Product Design Leader with 12+ years across fintech, banking, federal healthcare, and enterprise platforms. I lead high-impact IC work, UX strategy, design systems, and cross-functional product alignment for organizations like Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Thrivent, and VA.gov.
Career Snapshot
Senior UX / Product Design IC · 12+ years
Selected Work
JPMorgan Chase · Sr. UX Designer · 4 yrs 10 mos
Led mobile UX for Bill Pay, Zelle, Transfers, Wires, and Chase for Business. Shipped 12+ digital payment products and helped build the reusable UX component foundation that improved consistency across a 60M+ digital customer ecosystem.
Capital One · UX Design Manager · 1 yr 10 mos
Owned UX strategy and design execution for premium cardholder experiences including Search, Signature Collection, onboarding, events, and benefits. Aligned internal teams, agency partners, and executive stakeholders around one product direction.
↗Wells Fargo · Sr. UX Designer · 10 mos
Led interaction design across 6+ business lines during a CMS rebuild and mobile-first platform migration. Designed reusable Tridion components that helped mobilize 500+ pages and reduce one-off design dependency.
↗COA Solutions · UX Design & Research Lead · 11 mos
Led user research, service design, accessibility, and AI-assisted workflow design across VA.gov, VA Health Benefits, and NCA services in a regulated federal environment.
↗Thrivent · Senior UX Designer · Financial Services
Designing enterprise financial planning experiences that support advisors, members, research, feature delivery, and design system alignment across complex product workflows.
↗Capabilities
Enterprise UX & Design Systems
6 enterprise design systems built or strengthened. Component architecture, interaction standards, governance models, and reuse patterns for regulated, multi-product organizations.
UX Strategy & Product Roadmapping
Owned design roadmaps at Capital One and Credit One. I audit existing experiences, identify opportunity gaps, and translate business goals into prioritized UX initiatives instead of disconnected feature requests.
UX Leadership, Research & Alignment
Led agile design teams, UX research, agency collaboration, design critiques, and executive alignment with Product, Engineering, Data, Content, Legal, and Compliance partners.
How I Think
"Speed comes from clarity, not urgency."
Strong UX leadership clarifies the problem before the team starts producing screens. I make upstream decisions explicit so downstream execution does not stall.
"The teams that move well don't skip framing."
Most delivery problems are definition problems. I align teams on the customer need, product goal, and decision criteria before the work gets expensive.
"Decisions, not deliverables, move products forward."
A Figma file does not ship. A decision does. My UX work is structured to reduce ambiguity, speed alignment, and move product teams forward.
"Good system design makes the correct path obvious."
When the UX system is right, designers, engineers, and PMs make better decisions by default. Constraint becomes leverage.
Let's Build Something
Consulting · Embedded Design · Systems Architecture · Product Strategy
Bill Pay, Transfers, Wires, and Zelle needed a stronger shared UX and component foundation. As Sr. UX Designer and Mobile UX Lead, I helped unify payment patterns across product teams, improving consistency, handoff speed, and reuse at enterprise scale.
Context
Chase's mobile app is one of the most-used financial apps in the US. As product teams scaled independently across Payments, Transfers, and Zelle, each team accumulated its own design patterns. Visually the app held together. Structurally it was fracturing.
Components were duplicated across codebases. Design decisions were being re-litigated at every team boundary. Engineering effort was being spent maintaining inconsistencies rather than shipping value.
Problem
Without a shared component foundation, each product team was making local decisions with global consequences. A button interaction in Payments did not match Transfers. A list component in Zelle was architecturally incompatible with its peer flows.
This was not a visual inconsistency problem. It was a decision-making overhead problem. Every design review relitigated the same foundational choices, and every engineering handoff surfaced new inconsistencies.
The real cost was not inconsistency. It was the decision overhead that inconsistency created and the pace it killed.
My Role
I was the lead designer responsible for scoping, designing, and driving adoption of the mobile component library. Not just building components but building the case for shared infrastructure across teams with strong autonomy and competing priorities.
I worked directly with engineering leads to define the component API surface. I partnered with PMs across 12+ teams to identify adoption entry points. I facilitated the governance model that allowed teams to contribute without fragmenting the system.
Constraints
This was not a greenfield project. The system had to accommodate legacy infrastructure without breaking existing surfaces, meet regulatory and accessibility requirements baked into financial product interactions, handle cross-team dependencies where a single component change affects 12+ surfaces simultaneously, and maintain platform parity across iOS and Android without lowest-common-denominator design.
Key Decisions
Decision 01
Scope to the atomic layer first. Resist the urge to build templates.
Early pressure pushed toward full-screen templates for common flows. I held the line on starting atomic: typography, color, spacing, form controls, interactive states. Building the foundation correctly meant the layer above would compose naturally. Starting at templates would have locked us into product-specific assumptions before understanding the invariants.
Decision 02
Define a contribution model before the system had critical mass.
A library without governance becomes a collection of one-offs. Before teams were fully onboarded, I worked with engineering and design leads to define what "contributed" meant: what required central review, what teams could extend locally, and what was locked. This prevented the entropy that kills most shared systems at scale.
Decision 03
Treat adoption as a product problem, not a communication problem.
Teams do not adopt shared systems because they are told to. They adopt when switching costs less than building locally. I worked with engineering to reduce the integration cost of each component to near-zero. Adoption followed the path of least resistance, not mandate.
System Thinking
The component system was structured across three tiers: a locked foundation layer (tokens, primitives), a governed shared layer (core interactive components), and a team-extensible layer (product-specific compositions). Teams had meaningful autonomy at the composition level without being able to break the foundation.
Payments, Transfers, and Zelle shared a common interaction vocabulary for core flows while retaining distinct product contexts at the flow level. The system was connective tissue, not the product.
A good design system makes the right decision invisible. Designers stop debating the button and start debating the product.
Reusable patterns were documented with explicit rationale, not just usage guidelines. Each component spec included: what problem it solves, what it intentionally does not solve, and what edge cases require escalation.
Outcome
The Zelle integration, one of the highest-visibility surface areas, was completed on the component foundation with no custom components required. That was the clearest signal the system was working.
Reflection
The contribution model worked, but it took longer to socialize than it should have. In hindsight, I would have pulled engineering leadership into the governance design process earlier rather than presenting it for ratification. Co-authorship creates stickier buy-in than sign-off.
I would also have instrumented the system adoption earlier. Starting that visibility at launch would have let us iterate faster on low-adoption components.
Work With Us
Consulting · Embedded Design · Systems Architecture · Product Strategy
Capital One's Dining and Entertainment experience spanned desktop, mobile web, and app, built across multiple vendors with no unified design vision. I came in as the design leader, brought structure to a fragmented ecosystem, and drove the product to its best results year-to-date.
Context
Capital One's Dining and Entertainment portfolio including the Signature Collection, Search, special dining events, and cardholder perks represented one of the most visible differentiators for premium cardholders. The experience spanned desktop, mobile web, and the mobile app, with external vendors Kunai, SevenRooms, and Vivid Seats all contributing to the product surface.
The business had significant investment in this space. The design foundation had not kept pace. Multiple teams moving independently had created a product that looked like it was built by different organizations, because it was.
Problem
The challenge was structural: different design approaches across partners, variations in experience quality across devices, multiple stakeholders with competing priorities, and no shared long-term experience direction.
The product needed a design leader who could unify strategy across partners, guide execution, and deliver quality across all platforms simultaneously.
Aligning business goals with UX clarity was itself a challenge. Design had been treated as a delivery function, not a strategic one. Changing that dynamic required earning trust with directors and VPs before it could drive decisions at the product level.
My Role
As UX Design Manager, I led all design strategy for the Dining and Entertainment roadmap. That meant owning the end-to-end customer experience across all surfaces, leading design reviews with clear problem statements and JTBD alignment, and ensuring consistency across every partner contribution.
I presented directly to directors and VPs to secure alignment on direction, facilitated structured communication across teams to maintain delivery momentum, and mentored junior designers while onboarding new agency partners.
Key Decisions
Decision 01
Anchor every design review to a clear problem statement and JTBD framework, not aesthetics.
Design reviews had been running without shared criteria. I restructured reviews around explicit problem statements, design principles, and Jobs-to-be-Done alignment. This gave every partner team a consistent bar to design against and shifted feedback from subjective to structural. Partner quality improved. Review cycles shortened.
Decision 02
Connect every design decision explicitly to a business goal or customer outcome.
Design had been delivering artifacts. I shifted the output to decisions. Every proposal came with a business rationale, not just a visual recommendation. This repositioned design from a delivery function to a strategic one, and gave me the language to present to VPs and directors in terms they acted on.
Decision 03
Hold the long-term vision while shipping near-term, and be explicit about the tradeoff.
I kept a documented long-term experience vision alive throughout. When near-term decisions deviated from it, I named the tradeoff explicitly rather than letting it slip quietly. Teams that know the tradeoff can make it consciously. Teams that do not just accumulate debt.
Work Delivered
Search & Discovery
Search optimization and Special Dining Events including Jose Andres partnerships, Miami Eat, and NYC Eat.
Led design strategy and cross-platform execution for the dining search experience and a series of high-visibility special event experiences. Coordinated partner contributions and ensured experience consistency across desktop, mobile web, and app surfaces.
Onboarding & Engagement
Revitalized onboarding, Animated intro to Dining, Points conversion, and Special Dining Perks.
Drove the redesign of the cardholder onboarding experience to increase activation and engagement with Dining benefits. Connected the animated intro and points conversion experience to measurable cardholder engagement goals.
Signature Collection
End-to-end design strategy for Capital One's premium dining tier.
Owned the Signature Collection experience, Capital One's highest-tier dining benefit. Coordinated with SevenRooms on reservation infrastructure and ensured the premium product tier read as premium across every customer touchpoint.
Outcome
Dining and Entertainment achieved its best results year-to-date during my tenure. Stakeholder trust increased across partner teams. Customer journeys became measurably more consistent across digital surfaces. The influence of design within the Premium Design Studio was elevated.
Reflection
Capital One is the clearest example in my career of what design leadership actually means in a large, matrixed organization. It is not about the quality of the pixels. It is about your ability to align people who have different incentives, different timelines, and different definitions of success around a shared direction.
If I did it again, I would have formalized the long-term vision document earlier and socialized it more broadly across partner teams. Co-creation of the vision would have compressed the time it took to build alignment.
Work With Us
Consulting · Embedded Design · Systems Architecture · Product Strategy
Wells Fargo's public site was mid-migration from a legacy CMS to a modern platform, and simultaneously being mobilized for the first time at scale. I led interaction design across the PSO team, setting standards, building components, and shipping across Home Lending, Investments, Private Bank, Merchant Services, and more.
Context
Wells Fargo's public site was one of the highest-traffic financial platforms in the country. In 2015, it was simultaneously undergoing two massive shifts: a CMS migration from Documentum to SDL Tridion, and a site-wide mobilization initiative to bring hundreds of pages up to modern device standards for the first time.
Neither effort was small. Neither could wait for the other. Both required consistent interaction design leadership across multiple product lines, business units, and delivery timelines, all running in parallel.
Problem
The challenge was maintaining design consistency and interaction quality across Home Lending, Investments, Retirement, Private Banking, Merchant Services, and Business Deposits, all moving on different timelines, with different stakeholder groups, budgets ranging from $250K to $499K+ per initiative.
The work was not about designing a feature. It was about setting the standard that hundreds of pages and a full platform migration would follow.
Without a consistent IxD voice leading across these workstreams, the mobilization effort risked producing a fragmented experience: desktop patterns force-fitted to mobile, inconsistent components, and a CMS that could not scale content authoring efficiently.
My Role
My role spanned three distinct responsibilities running concurrently: delivering production-ready wireframes in Omnigraffle and iRise for active projects, consulting on mobile-first strategy and component architecture for future-scope work, and leading the IxD standard that the broader team and content authors followed when enabling pages post-migration.
I collaborated directly with producers, IA leads, analytics, and business stakeholders, presenting design solutions, securing approvals, and keeping multiple workstreams moving inside tight sprint cycles and enterprise governance constraints.
Key Decisions
Decision 01
Lead with mobile-first consultation before production, not after.
On several initiatives I established a consultative mobile strategy phase before wireframes were produced. This prevented the most common failure pattern in large-scale mobilization: designing for desktop and retrofitting for mobile. Setting mobile constraints early reduced rework significantly across 500+ pages of Home Lending content alone.
Decision 02
Build CMS components to enable content authors, not to require IxD on every page.
Rather than designing individual pages, I focused on creating the right CMS components in SDL Tridion that content authors could activate themselves. On Home Lending alone, this meant designing 5 custom mobilized components so that once shipped, hundreds of pages could be enabled without requiring designer intervention on each one.
Selected Work
Home Lending · Mobile Enablement
500+ pages mobilized. 5 custom CMS components built.
Designed and delivered 5 mobile-enabled components for the Tridion CMS, including standard and targeted versions of the marquee container. Consulted on mobile-first strategy across Home Mortgage and Home Equity pages.
CMS Migration · Documentum to SDL Tridion
Platform-level IxD consulting for the full public site rebuild.
Provided interaction design consultation and mobile strategy for Wells Fargo's full CMS migration. Delivered mockups of mobilized components and page types to guide future-scope design decisions as the migration progressed.
Investments & Retirement · Public Site Enhancements
Mobilized 56 pages. 10 mobile wireframes delivered.
Led mobile enablement for 30 Investing pages and 26 Retirement pages. Produced 10 mobile wireframes, advised on IA, and recommended URL and vanity URL strategy for the enhanced public site experience.
Private Bank · Smartphone Mobilization
~100 pages. Mobile optimization for Insights, video, and audio.
Led IxD for mobilization of The Private Bank and WMIC integrated site including custom homepage masthead optimization and mobile treatment for Insights articles, video, and audio components.
Outcome
The CMS component model held. Content authors could enable mobile pages without designer intervention once the component system was in place. Projects delivered on-budget across initiative sizes from $250K to $499K+.
Reflection
Wells Fargo was the first time I operated at true platform scale, not one product but a system of products all dependent on shared infrastructure decisions. The lesson I carried forward: the highest-leverage design work at scale is not on the screen. It is on the system the screen is built from.
If I did it again, I would have pushed earlier for a shared mobile component library before workstreams diverged rather than establishing standards reactively as each initiative kicked off.
Work With Us
Consulting · Embedded Design · Systems Architecture · Product Strategy
Case study in progress. Covers human-centered, accessible digital services for Veterans including AI-driven burial scheduling and eligibility workflows under federal constraints.
Case study in progress. Covers enterprise financial planning UX supporting advisors, members, research, feature delivery, and design system alignment across complex product workflows.