Everything is designed, including careers.
Design Executives 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 executive leader.
That is the gap my coaching practice is designed to close.
I've helped design leaders at companies ranging from Apple and SAP to AI startups. I focus on design executives looking to expand their impact, to gain the skills, presence and self-awareness to be effective leaders in the board room.
Today AI is adding to the complexity of being a design executive. I've spent half of my career focused on AI and its impact on customers, products and the organizations that build them. I help design leaders not only navigate what AI is doing to their organizations, but also demonstrate why AI makes design more essential, not optional.
If you are a design leader looking to move into an executive role, I can also help you build the acumen, confidence, and skills to be seen first as a candidate for an executive position, and second to be successful in your future role.
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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. Together we'll work 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 build 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
Fluency only matters if you can use it in the room. I'll help you frame design decisions as business opportunities in real time, 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 can carry this into the next generation. I'll help you instill the discipline to connect customer insight to business outcomes, quantify delight in terms that matter, and make the case for design in a room full of people who think in revenue, retention, and cost. -
Is AI changing what's expected of you as a design leader faster than you can keep up
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?
Do you know how to structure and scale your design organization in response to AI? Locally, regionally, and 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'll run 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'll 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 around a deliberate arc, not a loose set of conversations. I may also ask to interview your colleagues, team members, etc. to help get a 360º view of how you are seen in the organization.
Frequently, I find clients benefit from foundational emotional intelligence work to help make other areas of development easier else possible. From there we may explore topics such as: clarity and transparency, trust and feedback, risk and failure, leading with purpose, etc.
Throughout the engagement you should expect a mix of direct consulting, structured reflection, targeted experiments, and the occasional reading that challenges how you think. No generic frameworks, no recycled advice. Every session is designed around you, and moving 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 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 is optional, now more than ever.
I have led design organizations for over three 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 with AI isn't learning the tools it's navigating the organizational dynamics and building business acumen. Its developing your leadership to expand design's strategic influence at a moment when everyone else in the room thinks AI makes you optional.
Inspirational Leadership
Inspirational Leadership is a structured six-module coaching program built specifically for design leaders. It covers the full range from emotional intelligence and transparency, to navigating risk and leading with purpose.
It will show you how to develop a team that can sustain that standard without you in the room.