Head of Design / Senior Product Designer

Head of Design with 20+ years building design functions, systems, and teams for complex B2B products: healthcare under HIPAA, fintech, crypto exchange, enterprise SaaS. I’ve worked across the full range, from hands-on UI/UX to establishing design as a business function reporting to C-level.
 
Design Systems at Scale: Built design systems as the single source of truth on live legacy products, including an enterprise healthcare SaaS carrying three generations of UI at once. Pushed adoption through ~100 engineers and a product owner reluctant to fund design debt. Design cycles dropped ~20%, downstream rework fell 10–40%.
Team Leadership: Led teams of 7–16 designers across multiple parallel products. Hiring, levelling, IDPs, mentoring. Several mid-level designers grew into team leads, including one who was close to being let go before we restructured the project.
AI at Function Level: Led AI adoption across a design function working under HIPAA/PHI constraints: prototyping in code (Claude Code, Cursor, v0), design-system-as-code, machine-readable specs, and automated quality guardrails. Not personal productivity, but how the whole function works.
Regulated & High-Stakes Domains: Healthcare (HIPAA/PHI), fintech, crypto exchange (EXMO), banking. Products where a wrong state isn’t a usability defect.
Conversational AI: Started CogniAgent (cogniagent.ai) as an AI assistant and grew it into an agent platform. Hired the team, handed over the groundwork, then moved to validating key decisions.
 
Outside of design I spend time in code: Claude Code, git, design-to-code pipelines. Not to replace engineers, but to speak their language and understand what actually ships.