I help founders & designers build amazing products and teams.
Force multiplier.
Taken from military science, a force multiplier is “a factor that gives personnel the enhanced ability to accomplish greater feats”.
This is precisely how I add value to early-stage startup teams. My experience as a designer and leader, forged in the hypergrowth environments I came from, affords an enhanced ability not otherwise available until much later in the lifecycle of the business.
How we engage, together.
There is no single-preset program, rather there are thematic arcs that emerge as the business evolves. Our focus areas can roughly map to the following topics: Design & Product, Talent & Hiring, Management & Leadership, and Org & Process.
And this is what we might see over time, plotted along the growth cycle of a startup. We visit Design & Product feedback and Talent & Hiring more often in early stages, and Management & Leadership and Org & Process in later stages. The second spike in talent might occur if I am assisting with hiring an incoming executive design leader. That coincides with an increase in topics oriented around larger teams, things that pose new questions that didn't exist in the beginning.
Design & Product
Critique is the PB&J of our sessions. We open figma, we pair design. New sprint work, refining something over weeks, or a conceptual sketch that you haven't proposed yet.
Theme and activity cards represent a few of many topics we might cover in our sessions.
Critique
Hands-on, with product and design feature work.
Ideation
Brainstorm approaches to new problems.
Strategy
Solving the right problem with the right approach.
Brand Development
Initializing, rebranding, evaluating, evolving.
Motion
Patterns for animation and movement.
Voice & Tone
Writing for clarity, and user and customer love.
Growth
Patterns for upsell, expansion, revenue drivers.
Security
Patterns for security, safety, trust.
Investigation
Patterns for exploration, aggregation, insight.
AI • LLM
Patterns for workflow and conversation.
Design systems
Through-lines from brand to product.
Visual language
Patterns for icon, illustration, imagery, typesetting
People
Talent & Hiring
Management & Leadership
Org & Process
Designers
Collaboration
Core skills
Design process
Quality
Critique
Managers
Design systems
Performance
Career paths
Rituals
Delegation
Hiring
Pipelines
Sourcing
Outreach
Interviewing
Closing
Design execs
Org design
Exec functions
Partnering
Planning
Comms