I do not see my job as simply running a design team. I see it as designing the system that designs everything else—the organization, the product, the culture, and the customer experience itself.
This system has five distinct layers: function, experience, company, business area, and customer. If I am not actively shaping all five, I am not doing my job.
The Five Layers
At the functional layer, I am responsible for building a world-class design organization: organizational design, talent, governance, learning, and culture.
At the experience layer, I am responsible for the coherence, usability, and craft of the entire digital portfolio—not just isolated features.
At the company layer, I am responsible for spreading design methods and ways of thinking into how the business operates, not just how we design screens.
At the business area layer, I lead real business units and treat them as the execution engine for experience and growth strategy.
At the customer layer, I am responsible for whether people actually feel less friction and more clarity, whether they trust us more, and whether over time they come to love us.
Real leadership is aligning these layers so that organizational choices, technical choices, and design choices all add up to a better day for the customer.
Systems Over Heroics
Leadership is about building systems rather than relying on individual heroics. Great outcomes that depend on who happens to be in the room are fragile and cannot scale.
I focus on creating mechanisms that make sound decisions and strong craft the default outcome regardless of who is present. This is why I care about governance with clearly defined functional representatives, explicit escalation paths, and real veto power. It is why I insist on design quality reviews and craft scorecards that are mandatory, along with playbooks that spell out what good looks like.
These are not layers of bureaucracy for their own sake. They are how we move from a world where quality depends on a few strong voices to a world where quality is institutional and reliable.
Talent as the Fastest Lever
I am a systems thinker but I understand that systems only work when the people inside them are exceptional. If I want a higher bar for our work then I need more people who already operate at that bar and who are willing and able to teach it.
Designers should have a career path that respects both deep individual contributor craft and leadership through management. We need extraordinary individual contributors who shape the work and extraordinary managers who shape the organization—both are forms of leadership.
I want a culture of friendly competition where people see examples of extraordinary work, feel stretched by it, and are expected both to learn from it and to contribute to that bar themselves.
Culture as a Flywheel
Executive sponsorship gives design real power and meaningful budget. That sponsorship enables higher standards and better hiring, which over time raises the capability of the team. A stronger team ships work whose quality is obvious to the company and to customers. Those wins build trust and credibility with cross-functional partners. That trust makes it easier to codify best practices and bake them into how the company works.
Once embedded, design becomes part of the operating system of the company and not a side concern.
My job is to keep that flywheel spinning, especially in moments when it would be easy to trade away craft or long-term design maturity for short-term delivery.
The Underlying Belief
Beneath all of this—organizational models, systems, quality bars—there is a simple belief. If we build a culture and a platform where great design is the default, customers will feel it every time they open the app, see the site, receive an email, or talk to us.
I want to build places where customers feel less anxiety and more control, where employees feel deep pride in the product and the craft that created it, and where design is so deeply woven into how we operate that it is impossible to imagine the company without it.
My philosophy in a single idea: design the system so that great design and deep customer love become the natural outcome.