Résumé · Atlanta, Georgia
Product leader. AI-native monetization and 0 to 1 growth across consumer and operational systems. Seventeen years and counting.
The through line is decision systems. An advertiser opens a setup flow and gets asked, politely, to guess. Ad platforms, operational tooling, and automation all share one job: turn that guess into a decision a person can trust. I design the system that decides, the interface that explains it, and the team that ships it.
AI-native companies bring me in when the product architecture and the decision infrastructure are still open questions. Direction, design, and implementation, all from one operator. I build the hiring and functional leveling rubrics for product design and research alongside the product work, so a growing team can level and hire consistently. The bar is product sense and domain alignment rather than domain expertise. In an AI-native team that matters more every year. It is the bar I used for seven design hires across Meta and Pinterest.
Lead design and product direction alongside product and engineering. The work is 0 to 1: turning raw model capability into something a person can use.
Created Performance+, Pinterest's flagship ads automation suite: $600M+ annual revenue, 57% over the first-year target. Secured 7 projects on the H2 roadmap with Director and VP leadership. Built the Optimal Setup Framework, the org's shared mental model. Created the Value Expression framing, where an advertiser's priorities act as signals rather than hard limits: a $104M Q4 contribution. Took the MegaNav navigation redesign to full rollout, then CTV and offsite strategy after the TVScientific acquisition.
Led six product designers through a manager's leave: held planning momentum, delivered executive reviews on compressed timelines, and made a senior hire.
Audited incoming product requests and found three workstreams sharing the same scheduling and control surfaces. Consolidated them rather than staffing each one, shipping a cohesive experience rather than the org chart. Delivery time dropped 30%.
Led design across ads automation and monetization surfaces, working with five designers and two researchers over three product areas. Planned the quarter, then handed execution to the designer doing the work and backed it.
Ran the research on how Opendoor's home transactions actually worked, then drew the end-state blueprint: how to model the operations, how to design the service around them.
Led the audience management redesign through a privacy transition. Mentored a team of 5. Designed the Mid-Flight Guidance framework, advice delivered while a campaign was still running, and the delivery insights system adopted across ads surfaces. Launched 7 projects including Value-Based Lookalikes and WhatsApp for Business, WhatsApp's first monetization effort. Designed and taught a product design course for Facebook University, two cohorts of undergraduate students of color and women. It ran after I left.
Co-founding President. Owned product and design end to end for a mobile payments startup solving offline attribution, connecting online advertising to in-store purchase. Led product marketing and operations. Raised $400K in angel funding, recruited the founding team, and brokered partnerships with Micros and WorldPay US.
Directed a cross-disciplinary team of six across product design, UX research, game design, QA, and illustration. Owned hiring, direction, career growth, and the quality bar through launch. SXSW Interactive Accelerator Finalist.
Led design for CNN's iOS app as an Apple launch partner for the iPhone 5, on site at Apple with one engineer on pre-release hardware. The redesign lifted ad revenue 7% and article read-through 25%.
Mobile Center of Excellence: multi-channel commerce and marketing. Ann Taylor in-store POS integration and the Verizon mobile web experience.
Design lead for CNN Mobile web and apps: CNN, iReport, and Election Center. Contributor to the 2008 Peabody-winning politics coverage.
Design got me to the room. The MBA gave me the language for what happens in it. The MBA was not a pivot. It was the missing half. Corporate strategy at the M&A and portfolio level. Financial modeling: DCF, WACC, capital budgeting. Supply chain operations. AI governance frameworks: NIST and the EU AI Act.
The capstone went back to Pinterest: an AI value chain analysis of the monetization platform I had spent three years designing, a causal inference study on the Shop Tab, and a model of ad budget optimization.
What changed is the altitude. I read a P&L and connect it to the product decisions that move the lines, and evaluate an AI implementation on experience and business model risk in the same conversation.
Standards encoded once, run on every build. I work AI-first, with AI as the execution layer rather than autocomplete. The practice runs on an operating system I built: eight skills and roughly twenty-five protocols covering engagement execution, prototype building, and case tracking. A build cannot skip ground-truth validation or ship without a verification pass. The gates live in the skills, not in my memory.
The pipeline runs brief to prototype to contract. A structured brief becomes a working HTML prototype built against the real component library, then an implementation brief and a data contract, verified against a running instance.
I ship my own products the same way. Sage Orange is TypeScript, sole contributor, with its rule set versioned semantically, like software. Presence is 234 Swift source files, built solo. The workbook system I built for my daughters generates volumes from code, with automated checks for arithmetic and fact accuracy.