Resume

I’ve delivered, impacted or influenced product design, product, business and engineering strategy and vision that has defined companies. As a product design leader, I’ve turned ideas into market-defining products for big companies (Yahoo!, Fiserv) and small (taking Greenlight Financial from $0 – $2.5 billion valuation).

Energage
Exton, PA / 2024 – current
Director of XD

• Building an XD team that’s building the product that’s making the world a better place to work.

• In the first six months, developed, evangelized, got C-suite buy-in, and generated company-wide excitement on a long-term product vision (and a plan to get us there).

• In the next six months, collaborated with the engineering team to fundamentally alter our approach to product development, while also delivering significant product enhancements aligned to the new vision.

Greenlight Financial Technology
Atlanta, GA / 2014 – 2023
Vice President of Product Design

• Joined the founding team as number 3 at Greenlight when we were worth $0 and had 0 users and left when we had 500 employees, a $2.5B valuation, and 6M+ users (with a 4.8-star rating on 480k reviews).

• Created the first product requirements for this app that helps parents raise financially smart children, then delivered the design vision from a lawn chair at my kids' baseball games on nights and weekends and landed a $7M funding round in 2017.

• Joined full-time (now that I could get paid) to lead product design and contributed significantly to the product, engineering, and business strategy that made Greenlight the leader in the family finance space.

• Advanced the company’s original mission by delivering savings with automated boosts, charitable giving, chores, allowance, financial literacy curriculum and games, kid-tracking safety features, and an investing platform as robust as most in the market but easy enough for a child to use.

• Evolved the mission to become a trusted companion for families with independent teens by delivering family location tracking, SOS alerts, driving safety reports, and a parent credit card to help establish a teen’s credit score.

• Evangelized and delivered a componentized UI design and development platform to be leveraged across our app and easily re-configured for partner integrations (vastly expanding partnership opportunities).

• Built, coached, and mentored a world-class team of 15 people who loved their jobs and laughed a lot.

Fiserv
Alpharetta, GA / 2012 – 2017
Director of Product Design

• Joined the Biller Solutions group on a Tiger Team with our lead engineer (the rarest of Tiger Teams - the elusive 2-person Tiger Team) designing, and developing new product initiatives... which mostly didn't work out in the market (good products, didn't make money) :D

• Shifted focus to overhauling our group's motley crew of disparate SaaS billing products (assembled through years of acquisitions) that required a months-long, manual implementation for each new client (companies wanting to invoice customers and receive payments online).

• Evangelized and designed a configuration platform to automate the biller setup and the creation of each biller’s customer-facing billing portal, then convinced C-level leadership to invest heavily in this initiative.

• Hired and led a small, scrappy team of designers and engineers to build the configuration platform that reduced client implementation from months to minutes (and delivered a happily-ever-after bill paying experience).

Reachable
Salt Lake City, UT / 2010 – 2011
Vice President of Product Design

• Moonlighted for a year or so designing the product and tag-teaming product strategy before joining full-time to launch the product, a relational database powered SaaS platform that mapped and graded lead opportunities for sales organizations (we were prone to describing it as "Salesforce on steroids" because of course everything was on steroids in those days).

• Delivered product design specification, information architecture, and UI designs, contributed to product requirements and strategy, and partnered with the engineering team to deliver this amazing new product to the market... which never made money :D

Yahoo!
Sunnyvale, CA / 2000 – 2010
Advertising Creative Director (2000 – 2004)
Director of Product Design (2004 – 2010)

• Joined the 6-person Yahoo! IDEA Group, a team charged with defining, designing, and developing the foundation of digital brand experiences for the nascent internet when a 30k animated gif was the high bar.

• Shared 2am takeout meals with Yahoo! co-founder David Filo while launching numerous never-been-done-before, hope-we-don’t-break-anything internet experiences that are still the standard-bearers today.

• Grew my team within the IDEA Group to 15+ as Creative Director and delivered bar-raising brand experiences that propelled Yahoo! to global leadership in search, email, messaging, communities, gaming, social networking, shopping, streaming media and just about anything else happening online at that time.

• Recruited to the Small Business Product Design team after collaborating with leadership on the product vision just for fun.

• Guided the product vision and strategy, developed an iterative design roadmap, and led a small off-site team to equip SMB owners with tools to create the world’s first e-commerce storefronts.

• Set the record for longest jump in the 200+ pound category on a miniature electric motorcycle (cleared two reams of paper and a stuffed monkey).

Los Angeles Dodgers & Los Angeles Angels
Los Angeles, CA / 1994 – 1998
Minor League Baseball Player (Dodgers 1994 – 1997 | Angels 1998)

• Quit a dream job in advertising upon waking from an office nap with a vision to become a professional baseball player (despite not having played since high school, 6 years prior).

• Trained for two months, put together some video, sent it to all the major league teams, got worked out by the Dodgers on Thanksgiving morning, signed a minor league contract on the hood of my gold Pontiac Grand Am, and got home in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

• Played third base at Rookie ball in Great Falls Montana, and alongside future Hall of Famer Adrian Beltre in Arizona that fall, then high A ball in Vero Beach, Florida and San Bernadino, California before heading over to the Angels where I tore up my shoulder, couldn’t lay off the outside slider, and got sent home.

J. Walter Thompson Worldwide Advertising
New York City, NY / 1992 – 1994
Art Director & Copywriter

• Landed a dream job straight out of college, staying at fancy California beachside hotels on television and photo shoots for national brands like Clairol, Kodak, Nuprin, Motts, and Toys-R-Us.

• Mentored by J. Walter Thompson's President, James Patterson (a little-known author on the side, who while mentoring me was writing a little book called "Along Came a Spider"... from which he'd go on to sell a few gazillion books).