Work

Five case studies

Each one opens with the leadership question it answers, because decisions, not deliverables, are what a leadership role runs on. One study is open; the rest are shared on request: email me for the password.

• 01AI research you can interrogate How do you scale a research practice when demand doubles, without hollowing out the thing that makes research worth having? Synthetic personas grounded in real participants: provenance to source transcripts, a confess-ignorance contract, and an eval suite guarding the grounding.
• 02Prototyping the strategy before it had a nameon request What do you do when you can see where the company needs to go, and it isn't your lane? 50+ open-source MCP servers for pharmaceutical data, built months before agent-accessible intelligence became company strategy. And the choice that mattered: fighting for the thing, not the ownership.
• 03Helix: winning the design system fighton request How do you build contested infrastructure, with no mandate but the one you create? From zero to majority designer adoption in year one, five products live, and by year-end product teams requesting components unprompted.
• 04Research as an operating systemon request What does it take to build a discipline from nothing, and then make it the way the organization decides? Founded the practice, hired every researcher, moved it upstream. Demand up 114%, four business units, and the alignment peak landing in the quarter of deepest expansion.
• 05The AI validation gateon request When the whole company is mandated to ship AI, how does design leadership keep it honest? Research repositioned as the answer to AI uncertainty: 24 validation workshops, nine AI products deeply validated, and checkbox AI stopped before it shipped.