I help CEOs and CPOs fix, staff, and hand off design functions. I'm not a consultant with a deck. I'm a design leader with start end dates.
I Run design until you have someone who can
Founder-led or VP-Product-led design works until it doesn’t. The team grows past what one non-designer can manage. Hiring stalls because nobody can read a portfolio. Research is whoever happens to ask a customer about what matters. The permanent leader is six months away.
I step in as Head or VP of Design with full ownership of the function: the team, hiring, tooling, and operating rhythm. Then I hand it off to the permanent hire and leave.
And the quiet part, since it’s usually why the phone rings: there’s a person or two who should have been managed out a while ago. Everyone knows it, nobody wants to be the one, and the longer it waits, the more it costs the people doing the carrying. I take that part of the job. I run a fair evaluation against a written bar instead of a mood, and when the answer is exit, I own it: the decision, the conversation, the transition. Sometimes the evaluation comes back the other way and the person everyone wrote off turns out to be misassigned, not underperforming. Either way, you get an answer you can defend, and it isn’t you who had to be the villain.
You’re here for a reason. Tell me what’s going on with your design function
Hire designers who can do the job you actually have
Most design hiring fails at the top of the funnel. The resume reads well, the portfolio looks good, and four interviews later the panel finds out the candidate has never done the job the role actually is. That’s a month of everyone’s time spent learning something a ten-minute screen should have caught.
At Bubble, I ran four concurrent IC searches. Over 1,700 candidates crossed my desk in nine months on the three IC roles alone. About 1,300 didn’t survive the first pass; 436 earned a full structured read against the bar, and on the three largest roles my pre-screen verdict matched the final panel outcome 94 to 96 percent of the time. The recruiter ran first-round screens I never had to redo; three senior designers were hired.
The number isn’t luck. It’s apparatus:
• Role bars that name the disqualifiers. What the role needs, what no amount of polish compensates for, and the order to check them in.
• Structured screens at every stage. Recruiter screen, hiring-manager screen, portfolio panel, design crit, with rubrics and advancement thresholds the panel can apply without me in the room.
• Calibration. A log of where the process got it wrong and why, so the bar tightens over time instead of drifting with whoever interviewed last.
• Panel protocols for exec attendees. Where the VP sits in the loop, what they test, and how their read gets weighed against the panel’s.
• 30-day onboarding plans for each hire, with pod relationships built in week one.
I also sat on PM loops as the design interviewer, because design’s read on a PM candidate is signal the panel shouldn’t lose.
Build the Product design people system
A design team without a ladder runs on vibes. Titles drift, reviews are a manager’s mood, and every hire is negotiated from scratch because nobody wrote down what Senior means here. I write the ladder and everything that hangs off it: level definitions by scope, autonomy, and influence; a job description and hiring process per level; a performance evaluation format managers can run without me; and a hiring plan sequenced against the product roadmap and the engineering plan, so design grows in step instead of behind. I built this from scratch at Sigma and rebuilt it at Bubble. The ladder is the same DNA every hiring manager in this profession uses; what changes per company is the scope at each rung.
Make research something the whole team can run
Research at most startups is a tool subscription and a Slack channel. The power users answer every survey. The PMs who know a researcher get studies; the rest guess. Incentives come out of someone’s corporate card. I set up research operations: platform selection, recruiting workflows, participant sourcing, incentive budgets, consent, templates. The goal is for PMs and designers to run their own studies on a shared system, not have the absence of a research team be the bottleneck.
I have working relationships at Maze, User Interviews, Listen Labs, Great Question, Voice Panel, Rally, and Figma. That means pilots and pricing conversations that start on week one, not after a month of demos, and a straight answer on which tools will still be worth paying for next year.
I Leave Behind a function that runs without me
The measure of an interim engagement is what’s true the week after it ends. Everything I build is documented for the person inheriting it: the career ladder, job descriptions and hiring process per level, performance evaluations, the hiring plan, a dossier on every designer, org state of play, the hiring apparatus, research operations, tool ownership and billing. The permanent leader gets a system, not a set of habits that lived in my head.
Who this is for
• Series A through C companies with a product team and no design leader.
• A CPO or VP Product who owns design and would rather not.
• A company between design leaders, with a search underway or about to start. I’ll hold the seat, run the search, and close the hire.
• A design team that needs hiring, research, or process fixed before a permanent leader arrives.
• A team with a performance problem everyone knows about, and nobody has named.
Who this is Not for
Agencies looking for a product designer, or companies that want a design leader without the authority to lead.
lets talk