Product designer & builder
The medium keeps changing.
The human does not.
I have spent my whole career designing for the person on the other end while the medium reinvented itself under me. Paper and plastic. Then pixels. Now whatever we are calling intelligence this year. Today I help founders figure out what to build first, and then I build it.
Physical products at Hallmark. Real light, real objects, the shape of a thing in a real hand.
What I do
Judgment and a fast build, in the same person
Most people hiring for this are picking between a strategist who cannot build and a builder with no taste. I am both, and that is the whole advantage.
Figure out what to build first
Most projects do not fail on execution. They fail because everything looked equally important on day one. I sit with the vision, find the one thing that has to be true, and tell you what to cut. You get a scope you can actually start.
Build it
Not a deck about the thing. The thing. Working software, in front of real users, in weeks. Twenty years of product judgment plus AI-augmented build speed is a strange combination, and it is the point.
Make the complicated thing clear
Data products, decision tools, anything where someone has to understand something hard and then act on it. I invented a chart type once because the existing ones were not telling the truth. That is the instinct.
Selected work
A claim, and the proof of the claim
inFormed Consent
A patented platform that turns informed consent from a signature into something a patient actually understands. I built the technology from nothing: personalized AI avatars, video-tracked comprehension, live with clinicians.
through video tracking
Youth as Experts
Design-thinking workshops where the teenagers were the experts and I was the facilitator, then the two-product prototype their own ideas asked for. The clearest proof of how I run discovery.
Data + Design
Dashboards leaders actually use, the invented Leapfrog Chart for a Fortune 10 client, and the Coral Resilience Data Platform. Turning complex data into a decision someone can make.
Step Up Your Game
Wireframing a one-stop platform that gives young athletes a high athletic IQ, combining physical therapists, dietitians, and coaches into one guided experience.
Six patents
Light and shadow projection. Real-time sound. A fill-in-the-blank audio story engine. A holiday toy microphone. This is where I learned that an idea can become a product, a patent, and a line of revenue, and that the distance between those three is mostly nerve.
Tarot CoPilot
A CustomGPT that encodes the seventy-eight-card Rider-Waite deck for a personalized reading. Proof I keep my hands in the current medium, not just talk about it.
MVP Scoper
You describe what you want to build. It tells you what to build first and what to cut. Built on my own design system, running live against the Claude API. The scoping conversation I have with clients, turned into a thing you can use.
The arc
Same job. Three materials.
The medium did not change on a clean date. It changed under me while I was mid-project. That overlap is the interesting part.
Photography and physical product
I started at Hallmark in the photo studio, a designer who shot the photographs and built them into greeting cards. Physical products, real light, the shape of a thing in a real hand. Later I led product and design across the physical lines, standing on factory floors watching a drawing turn into an object.
The medium changed under me
Around 2000, at a dot-com startup called eScout, I taught myself to hand-code the web before the tools existed and learned to ssh into production. They offered me a developer's chair. I turned it down to stay the designer who builds. Back at Hallmark I moved into innovation, treating anything digital as a new material, and the patents followed. A couple of my interns dreamed up an iPhone app and we built it, a beta, a proof of concept, and pitched it to Apple in Cupertino. Then came Playfair, where the work bent hard toward data. Same job, different material.
Building with agents
Now I build with agents. Multi-agent systems, custom models, AI avatars a patient will actually sit through. The tools are unrecognizable next to a photo studio. The person on the other end is not. Same fear, same hope, same small brave decision.
The rest of it
A few things that are also true
I teach
At Guang Ming Temple in Orlando I taught Buddhist philosophy, including a class called Visualizing Buddhism that merged data visualization with the Dharma. Take something complex, make it clear enough to hold. Same instinct as the day job. RYT 200, so the line about flexibility of body and mind is a practice, not a metaphor.
I make things with my hands
3D printers and scanners, a laser cutter, a CNC mill, Arduino, soldering, vacuum forming, sculpting, sewing. Solidworks and Rhino. I am suspicious of anyone who designs objects and has never ruined one.
I started over
Four years ago I walked away from most of it. A marriage of twenty-five years. A career. A whole identity. I became a startup CTO on the other side of it. It cost me things I am not getting back, and I would still do it. I do not say that to be inspiring. I say it because most of the people I work with are sitting on something they are scared to start.
Tell me what you are building
I read every one of these. If it is a fit I will tell you what I would build first, before you have paid me anything. If it is not, I will tell you that too.
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