My approach

Leadership Philosophy

I believe that people are inherently smart, talented and driven. They want to do something meaningful with their time and energy. The job of a leader is to help each individual on their team leverage this drive and desire, to help them stretch and grow to realize their potential.

A great product leader does not stay at a high level of altitude, simply coaching and mentoring. They’re visible, responsive, and close to the product. The best leaders I’ve worked with were always available, quick to respond and help unblock their teams.

A leader with this ability gets more from their teams. They do this by recognizing and cultivating unique and individual greatness. They create a safe, trusting and sustainable work environment. But most of all they inspire their teams to come together and create something greater than themselves.

On product design

A select few hard truths I’ve learned the hard way over the years.

• The customer is intelligent and knows their business better than anyone.

• Design is overused as a tool for specification and underused as a tool for driving alignment and decision making.

• The point of a prototype is the knowledge it captures, not the artifact itself.

• Design work undertaken without a clear problem to solve will usually result in more regressions than added value.

• It can be liberating to ask yourself: what if we had to ship in days or weeks rather than months?

• Design quality is less an issue with talent or process and more a downstream effect of culture, leadership, and planning.

• A good MVP is both a high-quality value add and a promise of what’s to come.

• Most prototypes are an articulation of what isn’t yet known about the problem.