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Essays on AI, design leadership, and product strategy from 18+ years in the industry.

Design Leadership

Why Most Designers Will Never Become Director. And It Has Nothing To Do With Skill.

Here's something most design leaders won't say out loud: if you're a senior designer who hasn't been promoted in two years, stop reviewing your own work.

Product Strategy

Stop Treating Onboarding Like a Funnel. Your Users Aren't Metrics.

The average fintech product loses 63% of new users during onboarding — 5.7 million people walking away from a product that failed them in their first sixty seconds.

Product Strategy

Neo-banks Didn't Lose to Banks. They Lost to Themselves.

Only 15% of neo-banks are profitable in 2026. Twenty-seven percent of new users go inactive within their first year. Thirty-nine percent hold accounts at both a neo-bank and a traditional bank.

AI & Design

Google Declared War on Figma. The Wrong People Are Worried.

Google relaunched Stitch on March 19th. AI-native infinite canvas, voice commands, multi-screen generation from a natural language prompt. The Figma PMs are relaxed. The designers are panicking.

Product Strategy

Compliance Is Not a Constraint. It Is the Only Differentiator Fintech Has Left.

Open every consumer fintech app in dark mode. Gradient cards. AI tiles. Apple Wallet-style lists. They all look identical — because they all copied the same three references.

Design Leadership

What Running an Agency Taught Me About Director-Level Clarity

The best thing I ever did for my director-level work was stop being a director. Leaving the structure of a big org and running client delivery from scratch stripped away every comfort blanket.

Design Leadership

The AI Hiring Bet That's Already Going Wrong

66% of CEOs plan to freeze or cut hiring through the rest of 2026. The assumption: AI will absorb the output. What they haven't accounted for is the quality gap no model can close.

Design Leadership

The Rise of the Super IC: Why the Best Senior Designers Don't Want Your Management Title

The most dangerous thing happening in design right now isn't AI. It's the quiet exodus of the best senior designers away from management and into deep, autonomous craft.

AI & Design

The Figma Canvas Is Now Open to AI Agents. Most Design Teams Aren't Ready.

Figma just gave AI agents write access to your design files. Not read access. Write. Through the Figma MCP server, agents can now create frames, build components, and modify live designs.

AI & Design

Your Design System Isn't a Library Anymore. It's Your AI's Operating Manual.

I have spent the last decade building, scaling, and maintaining design systems. Tokens, components, documentation, governance. The whole machine. AI just changed what all of it is for.

AI & Design

Vibe Design Is Real. It Won't Replace Designers. It Will Expose Them.

Describe a business goal or an emotional direction, and an AI agent builds you high-fidelity UI. The designers who are worried about this are the wrong ones to be worried.

AI & Design

Figma's AI Agents Can Now Design For You. Most Teams Aren't Ready.

Figma announced that AI agents can now write directly to your Figma files. Not suggest options. Not generate images. Write. To your actual canvas.

AI & Design

AI Fluency Isn't the Skill. Knowing When AI Is Wrong Is.

The industry just caught up to something I've known for seven years. NNGroup's State of UX 2026 — the headline is already circulating through every design Slack channel.

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