How I work
In every project I've led, the turning point was the same: the moment people got aligned on what they were actually building and why. Once that clarity was there, decisions got easier, teams moved faster, and the work just got better.
That's where I tend to be most useful. Helping people think through what they're trying to do, then designing processes and systems that support how they actually work. I enjoy optimizing, but the human element stays in the forefront. There's no point streamlining something if it stops working for the people inside it.
Working with ambiguity
I'm drawn to the moment before things are figured out. When someone has a lot of ideas but no clear direction. When there's energy but also confusion. That's not a problem to fix quickly. It's a space that needs patience and structure.
One project involved a young CEO of a trades company. Full of ideas, constantly shifting direction. The challenge wasn't technical. It was that every meeting brought new ambitions, and the team couldn't build on shifting ground. My role was creating a space where he could explore ideas without derailing the project. Translating vague excitement into concrete decisions, explaining trade-offs without judgment, and protecting the team from whiplash without shutting the client down.
Helping someone feel less lost is underrated work. It doesn't show up in metrics, but it's often the thing that makes everything else possible.
Designing for how people actually behave
A lot of process design assumes ideal behavior. That clients will deliver content on time, that teammates will flag problems early, that everyone reads the brief. In practice, people are busy, distracted, and doing their best. I'd rather design around that reality than keep insisting it should be different.
At the agency, we had a persistent bottleneck: clients not delivering content. The backlog grew, the team got frustrated, and the usual response was more reminders. But the problem wasn't laziness. Websites just weren't the client's priority, and the process assumed they'd behave like project managers. I simplified the questionnaires, introduced time limits, and made it easy to pause and re-enter later. No guilt trips. The backlog shrank, and the conversations got better.
Systems that guilt people into compliance rarely work long-term. Accepting that people have limited attention, and designing for it, usually gets better results than expecting discipline.
Improving understanding, not just output
When something isn't working in a collaboration, the first instinct is often to look at the output. The design isn't good enough. The code has bugs. The client keeps changing their mind. But the real issue is usually upstream. Someone doesn't have enough context, or expectations were never made explicit.
We had a designer whose work wasn't landing. The easy conclusion was a quality problem. But when I looked closer, the designer simply didn't have the context. They weren't in the client calls, didn't know the internal frustrations, and were working from incomplete briefs. Instead of pushing for better output, I improved the briefing: added intent, added context, added occasional calls. The work improved because the understanding did.
Collaboration is a relationship, not a transaction. When I treat it that way, the work tends to take care of itself.
On technology
I use AI daily. For writing, brainstorming, building, thinking through problems. This site was built with Claude Code as a building partner. I've experimented with generative AI for e-commerce, built small apps, and picked up new tools along the way.
I'm not fascinated by technology for its own sake, though. What interests me is how it lowers barriers. How it gives form to ideas, supports thinking instead of replacing it, and helps people do things they couldn't do alone.
The work I enjoy most is like conducting: you're not playing every instrument, but you're shaping how everything comes together. AI is genuinely exciting for that kind of work. It expands what one person can orchestrate without losing the feel for the whole. The best use of any tool is making the human part of the work better, not making the human part unnecessary.