I take a strategic approach to solving complex problems, using analytics to make quick, informed decisions and quantify impact. I value curiosity, clear reasoning, and authenticity. Track record of getting things done in challenging, rigorous environments — most recently as the first design hire at OPEXUS.
Open to senior and staff roles on established design teams, and to first-designer work where there isn’t one yet. New York or Washington, DC.
I help set the standards for the experience measurement practice, write them, and revise them by sitting with the people using them. The practice covers 49 applications and 1.7M monthly associates, with 96 builders across ten job families working from that guidance. I replaced ad-hoc support across scattered channels with a routed intake queue, and I’m now automating parts of the work with Claude agents that audit against the published standards and generate the required reporting.
Lead Product Designer, and the first one they hired. The three below ran at the same time. The design system made room for the research practice, and the research produced the argument for the portal.
Federal agencies were taking on more FOIA requests than they could staff for, and a large share were for documents already public but hard to find. I was asked to make processing faster. I built that, then built a second design arguing the problem was upstream, and had to sell a solution that reduced the volume the product was priced on.
OPEXUS had sold ten products to more than seventy federal agencies without ever hiring a designer. The business worked; what it lacked was the structure to grow past that. I started with the component library, then spent a year getting it adopted by teams who were not convinced they needed it.
I was settling three or four close calls a week with judgment, and my designs were losing the queue to work that arrived with a revenue number attached. So I instrumented five products and connected them to Salesforce, then had to defend the first finding when it contradicted what leadership believed about its own roadmap.
Athen’s product analytics were the first time we could tie usage to accounts in a way that reconciled with what we saw in the pipeline. During the federal contraction we were pulling his usage data into renewal conversations directly.
Andrew ZellisDirector of Revenue Operations, OPEXUS
Sole designer on MEMS NextGen, the USDA platform managing more than 500 annual program reviews across federal food assistance. Weekly research sessions with regional office staff, and a systematic rebuild of the review and compliance workflows. Usability up 35%, task completion time down 25%.
Usage analysis showed professional pool services were worth roughly ten times what homeowners were. I moved the product off per-pool pricing onto tiered subscriptions and kept the core free for casual users. Conversion up 18%, retention up 20%.
A designer is not a person brought in at the end to make something look considered. The visual decisions are the last ones in a longer sequence, and any of them that cannot be traced back to what the product has to do is decoration.
Most of the job is establishing that purpose, and it is largely rational work. Usage data is cheap to collect. Prototypes are fast to build. Questions that used to be settled by whoever argued best can now be settled by testing. The argument for a design should be available before anyone has to take a position on it.
So I instrument what already exists and spend time with the people using it. I size what I find and set a target before designing anything, build a few versions against that target, and check after release whether it moved.
Agat 18K, expired Portra 160. Brussels and Dubrovnik, August 2025.
