About myself

Software designer focused on product development and emerging technologies

I enjoy helping companies shape ambiguity by working to define problems and develop solutions that can have measurable impact. Whether I’m working on a net new product and helping to find product-market fit, or defining new UX paradigms, I’m comfortable with the unknown and helping teams work backwards from nothing.

Designers sit at the intersection of customers and whatever team they are a part of. I thoroughly believe that, and one of my responsibilities is to advocate for users while collaborating with colleagues and AI tools to build scalable solutions that account for internal constraints—engineering and product requirements alike.

I think in design patterns, systems, components and foundations. My brain constantly considers, will this scale, can this scale, is there something we can reuse, when should we break the mold. I’m also pro involving everyone in the design process—founders, engineers, sales, marketing and of course, customers. Bring people in often, give them space to opine and you’ll create design advocates.

Less is more to me. I focus a lot on defining problems before jumping into design software, or prompting AI. Without alignment on the problem, timelines suffer. I’ve seen and felt this, and therefore I’m usually the guy that’s asking the “why” and “what”, not “how” we’ll do it.

“As an individual, Steve was an excellent colleague. He was a great team player, was self motivated, and most important of all, was someone I could trust.”

Mark Backman, VP of Product, Daily

I’ve spent my career adapting. From UX researching and customer interviews, learning prototyping tools, being proficient in Figma—I enjoy being hands on. AI has just opened a new world of tooling that, in my opinion, helps designers take on bigger tasks. I think it’s an exciting time to be a designer as the impact we can have is expanding. The challenge I feel is knowing which tool to reach for.

New AI tooling is changing the way that humans interact with software. I think we are still in the very early days, ones that are undefined, and for some that might be scary. But I really enjoy challenges like this, and feel that we’re really only at step one. How do we weave agentic workflows into experiences where a user knows what they want to do? How can we provide users with paths and help them avoid the blank screen paradox? There’s so many interesting UX challenges to come.

When it comes to design systems and UI, I've been thinking a lot about how we can evolve our workflows so that design can maintain and ship live systems so that teams are enabled to work on more complex business solutions. I think designers roles will blend into engineering and product, and in turn this should provide experts in those respective roles more opportunity as well. Smaller teams, can now ship much more than ever quite literally, ever before.

This site was designed and developed by yours truly, with AI support. Type is set in Matter (sans-serif) and Frame (serif).