Leadership

Leadership Philosophy

People-Centered, Objective-Driven

I believe the best design teams are built on transparency, accountability, and genuine respect. When you treat the people around you as partners with ambitions as valid as your own, and actively help them succeed, you create the conditions for everyone to do their best work.

In practice, that means I hire people with a founder's mentality, give them clear objectives and the tools to succeed, then stay out of their way. I set high standards and hold the team (and myself) accountable. I don't tolerate ego-driven culture, but I do expect everyone to play at the top of their game.

This is the only way to build a culture of innovation that scales.

How I Build Teams

I hire for intellectual honesty, a bias toward action, and the ability to hold a strong opinion loosely. A polished portfolio matters — but what I'm actually evaluating is how someone narrates their decisions, especially the ones that didn't go as planned.

In interviews, I spend less time on the work itself and more on the thinking behind it. The question I come back to most: can this person tell me what they got wrong and what they learned? That one quality — honest self-assessment — predicts almost everything else about how someone grows on a team.

[FILL IN: A hire you're proud of — 3–4 sentences. Who they were on paper, what made you bet on them, what they became, what it taught you about hiring. No names required.]

[FILL IN: A hire that didn't work — 2–3 sentences. What went wrong and what you changed as a result. Example structure: “Early in my leadership, I over-indexed on seniority for a role that needed collaboration over independence. The skills were there. The fit wasn't. Now I weight how someone works alongside what they've made — and I involve the team in the final decision.”]

Across OneTrust, Fiserv, and AT&T, I've mentored more than five designers into senior roles — not by managing their career for them, but by creating clarity about where they were, where they could go, and what was in the way.

What I've Learned the Hard Way

[FILL IN: One sentence describing a situation — don't name the company if sensitive. Example: “Early in my first director role, I inherited a team that had been under-resourced for years and moved too fast to fix it.”]

I underestimated [FILL IN: what you misjudged — the org's appetite for change, how long trust takes to build, a person's readiness, a stakeholder relationship]. The result was [FILL IN: the real impact — a missed deadline, someone who left, a product that shipped wrong, a relationship that took months to repair].

What I'd do differently: [FILL IN: a specific, concrete behavior change you now apply — not “I'd communicate more” but something like “I now map the informal power structure in the first 60 days before proposing any structural change.”]

Design Leadership in the Age of AI

AI compresses the distance between idea and artifact. That's not a threat to design — it's a clarifying lens on what design actually is. When execution gets cheaper, the premium shifts entirely to judgment: knowing what to make, for whom, why it matters, and what it costs to get it wrong. The designers who thrive are the ones who use AI to think faster — not to avoid thinking.

At Paciolan, I'm leading the strategy for how AI changes both our product and our design practice. On the product side, that means [FILL IN: specific initiative — copy from paciolan-design.html AI strategy section rather than writing new content]. On the team side, I've introduced [FILL IN: specific workflow change — copy from paciolan-design.html rather than writing new content].

The skill I protect most fiercely: knowing which question to ask before reaching for a solution. AI is exceptional at answering questions. It's not good at knowing which questions are worth asking. That remains a human job — and a design job.