Building teams and systems that last.

I’ve built two disciplines from scratch, and grown a third.

User experience. When I joined Dragon Army, I was its only UX person. There was no UX practice, so I built one. As the work grew, I hired my first team member, a junior designer who had completed UX coursework but had never held a UX job. To set her up for success, I turned my own workflow into processes, templates, and deliverables someone else could work from, and mentored her on everything from our deliverables to working with clients. The team grew from there.

Strategy. Strategy wasn’t a formal discipline. It was a gap that different people filled when they could, and more and more of it fell to me. When the CEO asked me to formalize it, I followed the same approach: define the deliverables, build the practice into our process, and look for places to add value. I hired our first strategist and developed Applied Game Theory™, which gave the team, and the agency, a distinct point of view.

Content. I inherited the content team when its lead moved on. It was a new kind of leadership for me: leading a team in work I don’t do myself. I leaned on the expertise of the team’s most senior member, guided her to formalize the team’s deliverables, templates, and process, and mentored the team through challenges and collaboration across the agency.

Some of my most important leadership is with teams whose specialty isn’t my own.

When our head of design left, the agency chose not to backfill the role. A senior member of my team and I split that responsibility. I don’t do visual design, so, as with content, my job is to create clarity, remove obstacles, and help talented people do their best work.

I also hired Dragon Army’s first technical project lead. It was a brand-new role, and I’ve worked with him to shape what it means and how it fits into the way we work.

When I see a problem that needs solving, I build the system that solves it.

• A deliverable library: a single source of truth for everything we deliver, with templates, samples, baseline estimates, and guidance for scaling each deliverable to different budgets. Sales uses it to know which options to offer. Producers use it to find resources and understand exactly what to build within scope. And it anchors our estimates. I estimate the UX and strategy work for our projects, and I’m often first, so other team leads can build their estimates from mine.
• Quality assurance: QA used to be a single contractor working on their own, with little visibility into the process. QA wasn’t my background, so I took courses, did the research, and built a complete testing approach: process, test plan templates, test cases, tracking, reporting, and a suite of tools, plus documentation to train and onboard new people. Today, QA runs through my team, using the process and tools I built.
• A shared Figma design system: used across the UX, content, design, and development teams to work faster and keep quality consistent.
• How we work: from changing the way we track work to managing our Jira implementation, I step in wherever the agency needs a better way of working.

I’m a key part of how Dragon Army wins new work.

I develop RFP responses, coordinate the team behind each pitch, and present in almost every new business pitch the agency makes. Applied Game Theory gives those pitches a distinctive point of view.

I measure my leadership by how well my team does without me.

I believe in servant leadership. I give people the tools they need and the autonomy they want. I stand up for them when they need me, and clear obstacles out of their way so they can stay focused on doing their best work. And I lift my team up every chance I get, because I want every one of them to know how amazing they are.

It also means turning what I know into things others can use, from the processes I wrote for my first hire to the templates and training behind AGT and QA. It means trusting experts to lead in their areas, and helping new roles find their footing.

I was named Dragon Army’s Employee of the Year for performance and teamwork.