I'm a player-coach design leader running an agentic design pipeline that compresses multi-sprint efforts into weeks. Twenty-five years of taste, now operating at machine speed.
Traditional designers bring taste but can't scale it. Pure technologists ship fast but can't tell good from plausible. The rare profile leads with decades of product craft and operates the AI stack hands-on — deciding what's worth building, then building it. That's the seat I occupy.
I don't "use AI tools." I run a designed system of agents — twenty-plus production skills that scan, diff, draft, validate, and build — with judgment placed deliberately in the loop. The division of labor, in one table:
Dollar General's Wallet was declining double digits. The fix wasn't more features — it was one architecture that six fragmented screens became, and it's still absorbing new programs two years later.
The operations system behind a one-person design org — 20+ production skills, autonomous scans, eval gates, and the org-design thinking that makes it trustworthy.
When a risk-based auth rollout dead-ended 25,000 customers, I directed the response and personally designed the system — 113 screens, 8 journeys, on deadline.
An AI-native rebuild of a legacy consumer category — opportunity brief, brand system, and a three-surface prototype with an embedded AI coach. Built solo-plus-agents. The category stays off this site; the caliber doesn't.
Anyone can generate interface now. The hard problem is making generated UI safe to ship. Token architecture and governance states as the guardrail layer.
Six years designing how SOC analysts supervise machine action under pressure — the same patterns now called agent UX. Foundation for Swimlane Turbine.
The first cash-back program in the discount channel — a white-label Ibotta integration co-mingled with coupons so seamlessly customers never knew it was a partner. Nine million dollars back in pockets.
A devotional reading app with an AI companion fenced to a closed corpus — because open models misquote sources. Anti-streak by conviction. Founded and built solo-plus-agents.
Adding a continuity rewards program across Dollar General's billion-clip ecosystem — a single card system that works at every touchpoint from discovery to checkout, on three platforms.
The thesis: AI compresses everything before and after the craft moment. The craft moment stays human. How I operate as creative director of machine output.
Read →Why the designer's job isn't disappearing — it's relocating. Where design work actually lives now, and what that changes about how you lead.
Read →When production stops being the constraint, knowing it's right becomes the scarce thing. The three lines design leadership has to draw in the blur.
Read →Independent practice contracting corp-to-corp through Ellev8 Solutions LLC — fractional design leadership and AI-workflow enablement for enterprise teams. In parallel, two 0→1 ventures carried from opportunity brief to working prototype, solo-plus-agents, on the same pipeline documented across this site.
Embedded design leader for a Fortune 500 retailer's digital ecosystem, reporting to the CDO. Led an eight-person UX team across products serving 12M+ MAU. Player-coach throughout: personally designed the authentication rescue and Wallet turnaround while running four concurrent workstreams. Built the agentic design-ops pipeline (Claude Code, Figma MCP, custom skill chains) that roughly doubled what the team could ship — compressing multi-sprint efforts into weeks.
Built the design function from zero at a cybersecurity SOAR startup, through Series A, B, and C. Designed how analysts supervise automated action under pressure — the pre-launch foundation for Turbine, Swimlane's agentic AI platform, and its marketplace of playbooks and agents. 100+ component design system that outlasted my tenure.
Led digital strategy at a boutique Denver agency. Pioneered the embedded product designer model at SendGrid — the operating pattern that later defined the Dollar General engagement. Clients: Denver Public Schools, The Aspen Institute, Prime Health.
First director-level role. Led the digital team across a "Whole Brand" strategy firm's client family.
Eight profitable, bootstrapped years owning everything: creative direction, UX, front-end build (HTML/CSS/JS), CMS, cash flow, clients. W3 Silver Award, 2008. The full-stack foundation that today powers the agentic pipeline work — I was a product builder before it had a name.