Build the system and the people who carry the work.
I build design organizations where standards sharpen judgment instead of replacing it. Across teams, product brands and departments, I have created the systems, governance and working conditions that help people make coherent decisions without making every decision depend on me.
STRONGER
01The team
Theteamshouldleavestrongerthantheworkrequired.
Scene 1/3 01 Practice
01Practice
How I lead a design organization
The quality of a design organization is visible in the judgment people can exercise, the coherence they can protect and the work they can complete without rescue.
Develop judgment.
Teach the principles beneath the work so people can evaluate and improve it without waiting for permission.
Govern without becoming the bottleneck.
Build standards, tools and review points that protect coherence while leaving room for capable people to think.
Connect design to the organization.
Help Product, Marketing, Member Care and leadership understand how design decisions affect their goals and the customer’s experience.
Make quality operational.
Move quality out of individual heroics and into briefs, systems, critique, ownership and repeatable working habits.
Build people who can go farther.
The goal is not dependence on the director. It is a team capable of creating the work they entered the field hoping to make.
02Brand in the product
Storyturnsafeaturefromgenerictosignature.
Scene 2/3 02 Outcomes
02Outcomes
Selected leadership outcomes
The measure of design leadership is how much stronger the people, decisions and work become because the system exists.
The 2020 Covenant Eyes rebrand
Brand became a primary company initiative.
I resolved a four-year strategic deadlock through an executive onsite, then led the company’s first comprehensive redefinition in 2020, establishing the architecture and standards a growing portfolio would need.
Portfolio architecture and the 2025 Victory strategy
Four brand layers, each with a defined job.
I helped define Covenant Eyes as the institutional authority and designed the architecture assigning Victory the product job, Five Stones the church channel and the content brands their specialized audiences, with levels of disclosure that let the portfolio appear together or selectively. Victory itself was repositioned from monitoring to becoming and formation.
Turned brand strategy into product behavior for the first time.
I built the cross-functional partnership between brand and product design, then gave the team a shared way to work through story, metaphor, archetype and the respective roles of brand, customer and product. Product designers moved from asking how brand could enter the interface to seeing how story could shape a feature. Metaphor became experience in Night Road and its daytime counterpart, in the taxonomy, badge system, buttons and feature behaviors that moved the interface from generic utility toward a signature Victory experience. The conversation moved from “I don’t understand how you bring brand into the product” to “I never knew how much story could inspire the way I design a feature.”
Aligned 20+ writers across Marketing, Product and Member Care.
Built a cross-functional governance model and AI-supported voice framework that helped teams work from shared principles while preserving human review and accountability.
A short fractional engagement with America’s first Christian mobile wireless service. I led positioning, messaging, onboarding and lifecycle strategy, translated the network technology into language customers could understand, and began building the company’s first integrated marketing operating system.
Turned a differentiated network capability into a position customers could understand.
Designed the company’s first integrated marketing operating system, connecting workstreams to ownership, reporting and the customer journey.
Used AI-assisted workflows to accelerate research, comparison, writing and system development, with every output judged and released by a person.
Director of Creative Marketing
Covenant Eyes
Remote / Owosso, Michigan · 2018–May 2026
Creative and brand leadership inside an enterprise SaaS company, across eleven years with the company (2015–May 2026). In its first Creative Director role, I resolved a four-year strategic deadlock, led the 2020 Covenant Eyes rebrand, and went on to lead the 2025 Victory brand strategy and the portfolio architecture organizing Covenant Eyes, Victory, Five Stones and the supporting content brands.
Developed a five-person team spanning design, public relations and motion.
Built the Scholarly Inquiry, the study of the vocabulary, elements and principles of two-dimensional design that designers complete moving from Level 2 toward a Level 3 senior role.
Replaced taste-driven, last-minute correction with principles, critique and greater autonomy.
Established the architecture and standards that held a growing portfolio of brands together, and created the Brand Council that settled what the standards did not cover.
Led complex work through executives and cross-functional teams, including the four-year deadlock, the 2020 rebrand and the 2025 Victory strategy.
Building the capability before the title requires it
PIONEER
04Leadership
Helppeoplepioneerthecareerstheydreamof.
Scene 3/3 04 Leadership
I build learning, merit and promotion structures around the foundations designers need to make increasingly sophisticated decisions. My teams study the breadth and depth of two-dimensional design, move deliberately through higher levels of thinking, and receive opportunities to take on work beyond their current experience, with guidance that preserves their ownership, ideas and appetite for risk.
The foundations should not remain missing.
Designers moving from Level 2 toward a Level 3 senior role complete the Scholarly Inquiry: a structured study of the vocabulary, elements and principles of two-dimensional design. The knowledge begins academically, then matures through application until it becomes part of how they see and judge the work.
Practice the thinking before the position demands it.
I use Bloom’s taxonomy to help designers move beyond recall and understanding into application, analysis, evaluation and creation. They begin practicing senior-level thinking before those capabilities become table stakes in a senior role.
Give people work that lets them grow.
I advocate for designers to receive assignments that may initially be above their heads. I guide the decisions without taking ownership away from them, making room for their ideas, experimentation and calculated risks.
Go ten ideas deep.
The first ideas often belong to convention. I teach teams to work through the early derivatives and continue until their preconceptions are exhausted. That is where they stop retrieving familiar answers and begin creating.
I continue studying strategy, systems, technology and craft because a leader cannot develop other people’s judgment while allowing his own to become static.
07Contact
Build a team that can carry the standard.
If your organization needs stronger design judgment, clearer systems and healthier creative leadership, let’s talk.