Before design, I spent years on the other end of the phone — front line, then Subject Matter Expert, Manager, Senior Manager, running support and provisioning teams. You learn things there you can't learn from a research deck: that people rarely describe the actual problem, that they blame themselves for bad interfaces, and that most frustration is a design decision someone made months earlier without thinking about it. That's what pulled me upstream, and eventually into design.
The through line is that I design for whoever has to live with the thing afterwards. On PaperCut's partner portal that meant 25+ editors across five teams publishing without a developer; on TwitchCon, a component system Twitch could change the week of the event; for Te Tautiaki Hoiho, a small conservation team who no longer wait on an agency. Pretty screens are the easy half.
I'm a planner by nature — clear roadmaps, things in order — which turns out to be what messy product problems and large stakeholder groups need. Because I understand code, business goals and customer psychology, I can hold a room of 10–12 stakeholders to one coherent direction and hand engineering something they can actually build.
I work in English and Spanish and get by in Portuguese, Italian and French — handy across global teams and clients. I'm genuinely passionate about design and art in every form, and I've woven AI (Claude & Claude Design) into how I work to move faster without cutting corners.
