About
Empathy is how you find the problem worth solving.
For eight years I've designed in regulated, high-stakes environments across healthcare, telehealth, and financial services, from early discovery all the way through interaction design and QA. Right now I lead design for AI-assisted clinical tools at a Fortune 25 healthcare company specializing in government-sponsored health plans. Before that I owned a consumer telehealth product end to end on a lean startup team and grew its request volume by 300%, and earlier, as a consultant, I represented design in rooms with CFOs and CIOs across more than a dozen teams at once.
Before any of that, I was a school psychologist. I spent six years serving students with disabilities and their families, and that's where I learned to lead with empathy, meet people where they are, and communicate clearly with everyone, whether that's a nervous parent or a room full of stakeholders who don't yet agree.
It turns out those are the same skills the work needs now. Whether it's prior authorization, clinical review, a zero-to-one startup, or seven teams each solving the same problem a different way, none of it gets untangled by a designer who can't get people to tell them the truth about how their day actually goes.
These days I spend my time working out which problem to solve at all, getting a room of people who disagree to share one picture of what's true, and handing leadership a decision instead of an artifact. The screens still matter. I just don't start there.
What I do
I design so the complexity never shows.
I've designed insurance authorizations, clinical review, AI-assisted tools, and a telehealth platform serving patients and the physicians treating them. No matter the domain, the person on the other end never feels the complexity underneath.
I build consensus and get products shipped.
I translate between users, engineers, and executives, from a startup standup to a room of C-suite stakeholders, so that everyone is solving the same problem. When it's time to cut scope, I'm the one holding the line on quality. Across those rooms I've shipped seven enterprise MVPs and carried one startup product all the way from zero.
I set design direction and raise the designers around me.
I owned the direction for two AI products from concept to production, and I define and govern the reusable components and interaction patterns other teams build on. I've mentored junior designers on design-system principles and constructive critique.
I do real research and design based on data.
Clinical training taught me to test what I think I know. I pair honest user research with the metrics so I can make design calls I'm able to defend, whether I'm redesigning a consumer flow for growth or untangling an internal workflow that nobody owns.
How I work
I design against real data as early as I can get my hands on it. Placeholder content hides the trade-offs that matter, and the feedback you get on invented data is invented feedback.
I'd rather watch someone work than ask them to describe it, whether that's a clinician, a patient, or an ops team three tabs deep in a workflow. The gap between the process people describe and the click-path they actually take is usually where the product is broken.
And I try to quantify the pain. "Everyone hates this" is an opinion. "Manual handoffs came up sixteen times across the teams, more than any other theme" is something a leader can act on.
Toolkit
Specialties
Tools
Saint Louis, MO · Working remote
Outside of work
I make things by hand.
I unwind with watercolors at the end of the day, and lately I've been custom-painting Delft-style tiles for my kitchen backsplash, one blue-and-white square at a time.
I cook around the constraints.
I'm an avid baker and cook, and after a Celiac diagnosis I taught myself to do all of it gluten free. It turned out to be its own kind of design problem, where you're chasing the same result with a completely different set of constraints.