I’ve spent more than 20 years leading product and design teams. Most recently, I led product for Adobe Help for seven years. Before that, I led design and research at Grand Rounds, Groupon, and Eventbrite.
My work includes setting product direction, hiring and developing teams, and helping people make decisions when priorities compete.
I bring product, design, and engineering into the same working sessions.
At Grand Rounds, the design and research team doubled to 17 people in 10 months. At Adobe, my organization reached 27 people; five of my seven direct reports were people managers.
The Groupon merchant design team, volunteering together in 2017.
“How we do work is as important as what we do.”
From the Grand Rounds design leadership guide
These cases show how I set direction, establish priorities, and build support for change.
Moving Help to new templates could have carried old problems onto a cleaner site. I required every migrated article to be rewritten around one customer task, and held that standard when peers pushed back on capacity.
TradeoffEvery team spent more time on each article. Contractor funding and a structured content repository that automated parts of the rewrite made it workable.
$8M+ annualized new ARR
Read the case →We had started down an incremental backlog. Our Director of Product and I agreed it would not close the gap, so we stopped it and reset the work around three member needs: finding the right care, understanding cost and benefits, and getting help navigating care.
TradeoffNew market-facing features paused for a 14-week sprint program.
+15% sign-ups, +51% service starts
Read the case →Engineering had set a responsive rebuild. I committed the design organization to it as our top priority, paused almost everything else, and embedded designers in engineering squads.
TradeoffMy team strongly objected because we weren’t ready for every mobile decision. Other design work waited, apart from the design system and a couple of critical initiatives.
40% fewer required checkout steps
Read the case →Leadership saw deals as inventory to sell to consumers. I argued for keeping Groupon valuable to merchants after one deal. The journey map won executive approval to rebuild Merchant Center. The merchant satisfaction trend and a speculative prototype then won over the PM who owned the backlog.
What it tookAligning teams in Berlin, the US, and the UK around one plan.
+200 bps merchant satisfaction
Read the case →Growing a design organization meant being clear about whom we hired, how people could grow, and what good work looked like. At Grand Rounds, we developed shared criteria for hiring, career progression, and design reviews.
A hiring workshop asked interviewers to assess the problem, the candidate’s reasoning, validation, and the quality of the work.
Candidates should be able to explain why they chose a direction and tie it to meaningful business measures.
The design level guide described both individual-contributor and management tracks, spanning design, research, and service skills.
A person’s scope, independence, and contribution should grow as they progress.
The design rubric connected member needs to UX, visual design, content, and service delivery.
Work should make it easier for members to reach the care team, use language they understand, and let them know their information is private.
Adapted from Grand Rounds’ recruiting calibration workshop, design level guide, and design principles rubric, 2018–2019. Working-document excerpts adapted for readability.
I start from the outside. I map the customer journey, write hypotheses from the public experience, and turn them into questions for the team.
Listen and map the journey with product, design, engineering, and partners.
Pick one or two shared measures with partners.
Propose the first bets, grounded in the team’s data.
| Stage | Discover | Decide | Start | Continue | Get help |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hypothesis | People arrive with intent from many places and need one clear next step. | Cost and eligibility questions are where intent stalls. | The first order, booking, or appointment is the steepest step. | Staying on track depends on knowing what happens next. | Help in context resolves more and escalates less. |
| Question for the team | Where do visitors come from, and where do they leave first? | Which cost or eligibility questions come up most, and where? | Where does the start flow lose people, and on which device? | Which milestone matters most after the start? | What drives contacts, and which could resolve in the journey? |
| Evidence I’d need | Entry sources, landing exits, search terms | Help queries, exits at pricing content, contact reasons | Funnel by step and device; usability sessions | Cohort continuation; contact reasons by stage | Contact reasons, self-service success, CSAT by channel |
| Analog from my work | Adobe: AI answer surfaces and generative engine optimization | Grand Rounds: price comprehension research | Eventbrite checkout; Grand Rounds onboarding | Adobe: signed-in personalization | Adobe Help: AI answers, 6.5M+ displayed |
I’m a named co-inventor on 15 issued U.S. patents covering recommendations, buyer questions, pricing, and invoicing. The work dates to the early 2000s; grants followed between 2009 and 2022.
I developed these with colleagues, and several are related follow-on patents.
Recommendations shaped by a buyer’s activity in the marketplace.
Letting sellers publish buyer questions and responses where other buyers can use them.
Connecting auctions, fixed-price offers, reserve prices, and buyer–seller negotiation.
Combining eligible purchases into invoices and managing the charges associated with them.
Creating better help content with Andrew Sandler
Awkward Silences · Podcast
Becoming a better manager with Andrew Sandler
Range · Interview
Seismic change: Blowing up your legacy enterprise system to start from scratch
UXPin · Enterprise UX Virtual Summit
LinkedIn · 15-part series on customer help and AI agents
Shaping your career: Tools for making the most of your job
Medium · Article
Medium · Article
Diversity of viewpoints in healthcare design
Medium · Article
Board member and past president, elected in 2023. The conservancy supports the three-mile, 254-acre park that runs through downtown San José. As president, I worked on governance and growth. We seated our largest and most diverse board class in years and built a wider coalition of partners.
Board chair. Good Karma Bikes is a San José nonprofit that refurbishes donated bikes and provides job training and free bikes to people in need.
Let’s talk about the problem, your team, and what a better outcome would look like.