I've been doing this for 20 years, starting as employee #12 at cPanel, the only designer in the building. No process, no playbook. I figured it out.

That experience set the pattern for everything after. At Waste Management, ENGIE, PROS, Amazon, and Google Cloud, I've consistently landed in environments where design either didn't exist yet or wasn't working the way it should. I build the thing, then I help the team use it. The $1.8M savings at Waste Management didn't come from a better interface alone. It came from convincing a billing team to remove a requirement that was blocking users. That's the work I'm drawn to: finding where the real problem lives and solving that.

I'm looking for a senior IC or lead role at a company where design has genuine influence over product direction. Smaller and faster beats large and bureaucratic. I want to be in rooms where decisions are being made, not handed requirements after the fact.