Everything is designed, including careers.
Design leaders have one of the hardest roles in any organization. The skills that make someone an exceptional designer: taste, craft, and user empathy, are not the same skills that make someone an effective leader of people, teams, and organizational change. That gap is what this program is built to close.
Most design leaders don't see the ceiling coming until they've already hit it.
That's where I come in.
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Leadership Skills AI is reordering every org chart and every assumption about who creates value. I'll help you identify your strengths, surface your blind spots, and build the kind of clarity and conviction that lets you lead through ambiguity, not react to it.
Organizational Design The question is no longer whether AI joins your team. It's how you integrate it without losing what makes your team good. I'll help you think through capability mapping, AI tool adoption, role evolution, and how to lead cross-functional work from kickoff through delivery.
Business Acumen The bar for design leaders has shifted. It's no longer enough to deliver great work, you need to quantify it, defend it, and connect it to outcomes the business already cares about. I'll help you develop fluency in financial thinking, strategic framing, and the operational logic of your organization so design has a seat at the table, not just a chair in the room.
Effective Conversations The most important skill a design leader can develop isn't making great work, it's making the case for it in terms the business responds to. I'll help you frame design decisions as business opportunities, connecting your arguments to growth, retention, efficiency, or risk, so that whether you're pitching up, pushing back, or aligning across, you're speaking the language that moves people to act.
Creative Direction AI generates options. Designers make meaning. The job of a creative director today is keeping that distinction alive in a team that's under pressure to move fast. I'll help you build the practices that keep your people thinking, not just prompting, so AI becomes a thinking partner rather than a shortcut, and the work stays anchored to problems worth solving.
Design-Led Innovation Innovation with AI isn't a tool problem, it's an orchestration problem. I'll help you build the process, skills, and organizational conditions that let design lead, not just participate, in delivering outcomes that matter.
Mentoring & Team Development Your job isn't just to build great designers, it's to build leaders who understand that solving the right problem means knowing how to frame it as a business win. I'll help you instill in your next generation the discipline to connect customer insight to business outcomes, to quantify delight in terms of metrics that matter, and to make the case for design in a room full of people who think in revenue, retention, and cost.
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Are you uncertain how AI is changing what's expected of you as a design leader?
Are you struggling to frame design's value in terms your business leadership actually responds to?
Do you find your team reaching for AI tools without really thinking, generating options instead of solving problems?
Are you unsure how to evolve your team's skills and roles as AI reshapes what designers are hired to do?
Are you uncertain how to structure and scale your design organization, whether locally, regionally, or globally?
Are you unclear on how to position design to lead AI-driven innovation rather than just execute it?
Are you finding it harder to develop the next generation of design leaders when the rules keep changing?
Are you unsure how to balance AI-assisted speed with the craft, judgment, and meaning that makes design matter?
Are you ready to take your career to the next level, or move it in a new direction, but unsure where to start?
Do you know what kind of leader you need to become next, but not how to get there?
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Good coaching starts with fit. We begin with a 30-minute conversation to make sure we're the right match before either of us commits to anything.
If we decide to move forward, we will have two discovery sessions. These are high-value working sessions, deep dives into where you are, what's blocking you, what you want to be different, and what success looks like. By the end, we will have a clear picture of the work ahead and a plan to get there.
From there, we move into recurring one-hour coaching sessions built entirely around you. Expect a mix of direct consulting, structured reflection, targeted experiments, and the occasional reading that will actually challenge how you think. No generic frameworks, no recycled advice. Every session is designed to move you forward.
Ready to start? Drop me a note with a bit about where you are in your career and what's prompting you to explore coaching now. It's also helpful to know whether you're paying privately or working from a company training budget. I'll take it from there.
I've spent half of my career focused on AI and its impact on both products and the organizations that build them. I've helped design leaders make that transition at companies ranging from Apple and SAP to AI startups. I've built design organizations from scratch and inherited ones that needed rebuilding. I've navigated skeptical CEOs, organizational politics, and the particular loneliness of being the most senior design voice in a room full of people who think design in optional—now more than ever.
I have led design for four decades, and I draw on all of it. The wins and the losses, the decisions I'd make again and the ones I wouldn't. My sessions are candid, direct, and grounded in what design leadership actually requires. Not the version in the books. The version you encounter on Monday morning.
I'm not a coach who helps you feel better about a hard situation. I'm a coach who helps you change it.
Upstream by Design
The disruption narrative is being written right now, in your organization, by people who aren't designers. The real challenge isn't learning the tools. It's navigating the organizational dynamics, building the business acumen, and developing the leadership range to expand design's strategic influence at a moment when everyone else in the room thinks AI makes you optional.
The leaders who understand both the threat and the opportunity are the ones who get to frame what happens next.
Inspirational Leadership
Inspirational Leadership is a structured six-module coaching program built specifically for design leaders. It is sequenced deliberately, direct in a way that most leadership development is not, It covers the full range of what design leadership requires: emotional intelligence, clarity and transparency, building a feedback culture that works, navigating risk and accountability, leading with purpose, and developing a team that can sustain that standard without you in the room.
It will show you things about your leadership that are uncomfortable to see. That is not a warning. That is the point.