Getting Personal

Yes.

My career has never fit especially neatly into one box. I grew up professionally in digital experience and UX, moved deeper into product strategy and organizational leadership, spent years working around emerging technology and innovation, and have also been an entrepreneur and inventor outside of my day job. Those experiences influence one another. Design taught me to start with people. Product taught me to balance desirability with business value and feasibility. Leadership taught me that even the best strategy fails without the right organization behind it. Entrepreneurship taught me that eventually somebody has to make the thing, sell the thing, ship the thing, and answer the email when something goes wrong. Honestly, I think I’m better at each of those things because I’ve spent time in all the others.

I create the team I want to be part of.

That means high expectations without unnecessary hierarchy, direct feedback without politics, room to experiment without fear of getting everything right the first time, and enough trust that people can challenge me when they think I’m wrong. I’m a big believer in giving people ownership. Sometimes that means letting someone struggle a little rather than immediately giving them the answer. Sometimes it means moving the goalposts a little because I know they’re capable of more than they think they are. But accountability goes both ways. If I expect people to listen, I have to listen. If I expect them to accept feedback, I have to accept it too. And if I’m asking a team to take a risk, they need to know I’ll stand behind them, and I do. Ask them. I’ve been described by people who’ve worked for me as approachable, transparent, supportive, and willing to be vulnerable. That’s a combination I’m pretty comfortable with. Ultimately, my job as a leader isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to create clarity, remove obstacles, connect the right people, develop talent, and create an environment where great people can do their best work.

For a long time, I thought the product was the product. Eventually I realized it wasn’t. The real product was the environment that allowed something new to happen.

Organizations are already full of smart people with good ideas. The hard part isn’t generating more ideas. It’s creating the conditions where those ideas are born, be seen by the right people, gain support, and eventually become something real. It requires the right ingredients: people, permission, process, and momentum. My role has often been connecting those ingredients—bringing together people who don’t normally work together, translating an idea into something others can see, finding an executive willing to champion it, or simply creating enough room for someone to try something that hasn’t been tried before. When those things come together, we can make magic happen. That’s also why some of the work I’m proudest of isn’t necessarily a product. It’s a team that became dramatically better, a new way of working, or an idea someone else was finally able to bring to life.

The ones where the answer isn’t obvious yet 😉

I’ve always been drawn to complex problems that sit somewhere between product, technology, people, and organizational change. A mature product that needs to be reimagined. A fragmented collection of experiences that needs a larger vision. A talented team that isn’t operating as well as it could. An emerging technology everyone knows is important but nobody quite knows what to do with yet. Those situations usually don’t come with a playbook, and I like that. I’m good at stepping into ambiguity, understanding the pieces, finding connections that aren’t immediately obvious, and helping people turn something fuzzy into something they can actually act on. Sometimes the answer is a product, and other times it’s a strategy, a prototype, a new operating model, or simply getting the right people into the same room and asking a different question. I don’t need to know the answer when I walk in. I need to know how to help us find it.

Yes, although not in the way I did earlier in my career.

I’m perfectly happy getting into a whiteboard, sketching an idea, working through a workflow, critiquing an experience, or helping turn something abstract into something people can react to. But I don’t need to be the person pushing every pixel. These days I’m most valuable one level above that: helping teams understand the problem we’re actually trying to solve, connecting customer needs with business strategy and technology, challenging assumptions, and helping talented designers and product people do better work. I still love making things. I’ve just developed a much broader definition of what “making” means.

Definitely more than a few business classes could have.

I’ve created products, filed patents, run Kickstarter campaigns, licensed intellectual property, worked with manufacturers, built e-commerce businesses, dealt with international fulfillment, answered customer service emails, designed packaging, bought advertising, worried about margins, and experienced the strange satisfaction of watching something that started as a sketch arrive at someone’s house on the other side of the world. Doing those things with your own money changes your perspective. It makes concepts like customer value, prioritization, scope, unit economics, speed, and “good enough to ship” very real. It has also kept me close to the part of product development I’ve always loved most: having an idea and figuring out how to make it exist.

Absolutely. But probably not in the way you might think.

I didn’t ask AI to write a website about me and accept whatever came back. Before anything made its way onto this site, I gave it a lot to work with: years of self-evaluations, annual reviews, quarterly feedback from managers, recommendations from people I’ve worked with, project histories, accomplishments, metrics, and plenty of my own writing. I also spent time defining how I wanted to sound. There were ideas—and even specific sentences—I knew had to come from me because they represent things I genuinely believe. Just as importantly, I was deliberate about defining the role I wanted AI to play. From there, it became a true collaboration. We challenged ideas, rewrote sections, threw entire pages away, refined the details, and kept iterating until it sounded like me. The collaboration went well beyond the writing. AI helped me prototype interactive elements, generate and refine JavaScript for many of the subtle animations throughout the site, troubleshoot code, and accelerate the technical side of bringing the experience to life. I still made the decisions, but AI often helped me get there faster. That’s become my philosophy for AI in general. I don’t see it as a replacement for expertise, creativity, or critical thinking. I see it as a remarkably capable collaborator—one that can help you write, design, code, brainstorm, research, and build, provided you know what you’re trying to accomplish and are willing to challenge its output. So yes, AI helped me create this website, and I’m perfectly comfortable saying that. The ideas, experiences, accomplishments, and opinions are mine. AI simply helped me tell the story and build the experience, a little better.

I genuinely enjoyed my time at Ally, and I’m proud of what our teams accomplished together.

When I joined, Ally had a centralized Product Experience organization, and I was brought in to strengthen and grow the Detroit and California teams while partnering closely with Charlotte. Over the next three years, we modernized dealer experiences, helped shape the long-term vision for SmartAuction, advanced AI initiatives, strengthened relationships with the business, and, perhaps most importantly, built a team culture I’m incredibly proud of. My teams consistently delivered. Three of my ten direct reports earned promotions—the first promotions on the team in two years, and our engagement scores ranked among the strongest in the department (in fact, my team’s scores were higher than the overall department score). Near the end of my time there, Ally began a company-wide organizational transformation led with the support of an external consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group. For Product Experience, the changes were MASSIVE. The centralized UX organization was dissolved and replaced with a decentralized model that embedded designers directly within individual business units. Nearly everyone in the organization was affected, including my leadership chain (my boss and the CIO). Entire teams were redistributed, reporting structures were rebuilt, and my Detroit and Charlotte organizations were divided across multiple areas of the business. As part of that transformation, my role was eliminated. While I wouldn’t have chosen that outcome, I can 100% say it wasn’t related to performance. It was the result of a broad organizational redesign that fundamentally changed how Product Experience operated. Ironically, the type of work that excites me most is exactly what I was originally hired to do at Ally: building strong teams, modernizing products, improving collaboration, and helping organizations navigate change. Those are the opportunities I’m excited to pursue again. I left Ally with tremendous respect for the people I worked alongside and genuine pride in what we accomplished together. The organization changed, but it doesn’t diminish the experience, or the relationships, that I built there.

I’m less interested in finding the perfect title than I am in finding the right problem, people, and environment.

I want to work with smart, high-performing people who are collaborative, curious, comfortable with change, and willing to question the way things have always been done. That could mean modernizing a mature product or platform. It could mean figuring out how AI actually creates value inside an organization. It could mean building or transforming a product organization. Or it could be something that doesn’t have a rulebook yet. I like ambiguity. I like connecting dots. And I especially like situations where technology, product, experience, and organizational change all intersect. Most importantly, I want to build things with people who care about doing great work—and who aren’t afraid to break a few rules when the rules are getting in the way.

There’s a pretty good chance I’m building, photographing, tinkering with, or obsessing over something.

I’m a lifelong motorsports fan and unapologetically Tifosi, so Formula 1 weekends usually involve cheering for Ferrari—and occasionally questioning my life choices as a result. IYKYK. Photography has also been part of my life for a long time. In an earlier chapter, I spent a lot of time photographing race cars and rock concerts. I still shoot when I can, and lately I’ve been having a lot of fun photographing airshows, particularly the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds. I’m also a maker at heart. I build products and side businesses, experiment with technology, design things that probably don’t need to exist until I decide they absolutely do, and generally have a hard time leaving an interesting idea alone. Apparently, “making things” is both my profession and my hobby.