I’m most at home when the problem is messy and easy to misunderstand from the inside. My default is to go find the customer truth directly. I’ve stood in front of Disneyland gates watching guests struggle to buy tickets, walked Toyota dealerships watching first-time buyers set up connected cars, and combed through 300,000 contest photos to learn what moments people are proudest of.
That field work, paired with digging into the data before proposing solutions, defines how I work. Ultimately, my goal is to create great software that is fast, reliable, and invisible. When it is, it can delight rather than burden.
Work That Shaped How I Think
My work on Amazon Photos is one example. Rather than asking what features to add, I dug into what customers actually valued. The answer wasn’t more capability — it was speed, reliability, and dependability. I led the team to build an AI tagging engine that recognized the people, places, and objects that mattered, scaled to tens of millions of uploads daily, with real-time video transcoding that dramatically cut storage costs. Users never thought about the AI. They just found what they were looking for.
At Disney, I analyzed ticket sale data first, then stood at the gates watching families try to buy tickets before touching any design. If commerce fails in a high-emotion moment, you don’t just lose a transaction — you break the magic. By focusing the team on the scenarios that mattered most, we delivered a new commerce flow for special events: $10M in revenue in the first season, shipped ahead of schedule at half the budget.
At Google, I reviewed real Android Play data across thousands of titles to identify which games would actually translate to a vehicle environment before recommending a single one. The data almost never tells you what you expect. The problems have changed across every role. The principle has not.
Looking Forward
I want to help teams adapt to the age of AI without losing the foundations that make products trustworthy — not just building with AI, but rethinking how we do discovery, run learning loops, and design experiences where the intelligence disappears into the workflow. Where customers feel more capable, not more managed.
If you’re building technology that earns trust by getting out of the way, I’d love to connect.
Outside of Work
I’m a photographer, a builder, and someone drawn to wonder. I’ve taught photography at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography and Photographic Center Northwest. I build things with my hands — electronics, woodworking, metalworking. I fly Cessnas. I run tabletop RPGs. I’m endlessly curious about how complex systems work, whether biological, technological, or human.
My photography gallery and Now page have more on what I’m up to these days.