Leadership for a bold beautiful creative future
"Creative possibilities are everywhere if we have the courage to see them."
Things are not alright. We must challenge the status quo. Working together, with courage, we create the future.
I find opportunities in the challenges others say are impossible.
Epics and sagas are part of my heritage. So are exploring the unknown, testing beliefs, and making connections between diverse people and ideas.
Epic poets craft songs that inspire others to live a bigger story. Designers create possibility where none existed. Product leaders head into the unknown and turn ambiguity into pathways. I integrate all of these.
Integrating empathy, strategy, design, and product leadership
Words
Words matter. My love of words has led me to hone my ability to communicate through writing and speaking, pursuing teaching roles, presentations, and media production. I've focused on verbal identity design to help organizations express what matters most and connect with their ideal audiences.
Images
As a poet I understand how words create images in the imagination. That "vision" has power to inspire people to action. I became a visual designer, ultimately honing skills in branding, UX, and interaction design, culminating in roles in product design.
Action
Words and images ultimately matter little if they don't lead to action. Decision-making with high degrees of ambiguity has become a key strength for me in product management and leadership. Sometimes the only way to turn "unknowns" into pathways is to step toward with intentional experiments.
Impact
Action should lead to impact. Understanding the outcomes we want to achieve and being able to measure that impact helps us learn and iterate toward a better future. Understanding our impact holistically is critical if we're to address the major issues of our day.
Workshops and Talks
Making Products: The Product Delivery Lifecycle
Whether you and your team need to create a solid process for delivering products iteratively, or you want to infuse your current process with some new ideas to improve it, this walkthrough of frameworks can help.
Agile Practices and Design Thinking
While there are similar foundational concepts in both Agile methodologies and Human Centered Design/Design Thinking, the two approaches rarely combine without a lot of friction — and sometimes tension. This talk highlights similarities and differences and helps pinpoint where some adjustments are needed to enable them to work together. Also available as an interactive workshop.
Product Management Practices for Navigating Ambiguity
Most business environments are complex rather than complicated. In a complicated world, experts can steer a company toward success because the unknown is known by someone. A complex world, in contrast, contains unknowns that no one has (yet) discovered. There's no expert path to steer from and the product leader must create clarity through experimentation and exploration. Iterative learning loops become the practices that navigate a team or a company from high degrees of ambiguity to market winners.
Visual Design Principles
Grounded in the foundations of user experience design and design thinking, this interactive talk (or workshop) provides examples of some of the most classic design principles and empowers people — even those who may not have considered themselves designers — to recognize good practice from bad. Shared language and concepts empower teams to think and design better for more powerful results.