I don't hand the
problem off. I carry it.

I find gaps. Then I own them — all the way through.

At Yerbba, I co-founded a healthcare platform for breast cancer patients. The gap was straightforward to name and hard to close: patients were leaving appointments holding clinical information they couldn't use. So I did what closing that gap required — business planning, user interviews, service design, frontend engineering, and enough backend work to make the data flow the way patients needed. Yerbba is operating now.

At Fixli, I'm doing it again. The gap: homeowners and handymen circling each other with no shared language for cost, trust, or project scope. I've designed the two-sided workflows, built the key features, and touched the database design underneath them. Fixli is ready to launch.

The institutional work is a different kind of ownership. At ICPSR, I led the UX for ResearchDataGov — a platform that unified restricted federal data access across 16 government agencies. Nobody handed me a scope that covered all of them. I built one. The design system I inherited there was unmeasured and drifting. I reclaimed it, rebuilt its architecture across three phases, and put measurement on it so drift became visible.

The breadth isn't decoration. It's what closing gaps actually requires. Sometimes the gap needs a new business model. Sometimes it needs a token architecture. Sometimes it needs someone willing to open the database schema and ask whether the structure is part of the problem. I go wherever the gap leads.

I start with structure before solutions. Before I sketch a screen, I want to understand the system: what states exist, what causes transitions between them, where the error cases are, and what a user believes is happening versus what is actually happening. This makes me slower to wireframe and faster to ship — because the decisions have already been made at the right level of abstraction.

I build. At both founding companies I've written production frontend code, touched backend APIs, and shaped database design when that's where the gap lived. I'm fluent in Figma, HTML, CSS, React, and Python. I can read a schema, have a meaningful conversation about tradeoffs with an engineer, and ship the feature myself when that's what the moment requires. That range is not incidental — it's what lets me own a problem rather than hand it off.

I write. A designer who can write clear prose is a better collaborator than one who can't — because writing forces you to commit to a position. Vague design is almost always a symptom of vague thinking.

Right now that practice includes an M.S. in Applied Data Science at the University of Michigan — because every gap I've worked on eventually hits a measurement problem underneath it. Design envisions the bridge. Data science tells me whether it's holding.