All new hires have tons of questions. I wasn't always available, so I created a custom GPT on common questions and taught it my management and communication style. It worked great. The catch — our Enterprise ChatGPT license wasn't provisioned until two weeks in, so they couldn't touch it when they needed it most.

I trained a facial expression classifier on a Kaggle dataset, ran it in the browser via webcam, and used it to detect sadness, anger, or disgust — then served a funny GIF. Built during an AI Product Design course. The point was making AI behavior visible while keeping the user in control of whether to act on it.

I got laid off and immediately built a custom AI assistant using VS Code to help me figure out what to do next. It has context on my life, my goals, and my projects — and it remembers things between sessions. I own it. It supports me.

The design org got approved for 42 new roles in one year. No one had a consistent way to interview. I volunteered to fix that. I researched how other companies were hiring, built a framework focused on ethical and non-biased methods — including dropping the design challenge. Got feedback from all the managers, presented to the VP, got approved. One shared standard across 12 hiring managers.

The layoff criteria was narrowing toward craft-focused designers and leaving strategy roles behind. One of my best people was at risk. I pushed back on my boss — this didn't feel right. We worked together to create a manager position for her instead. She is now crushing it as the manager for our AI Design team.

I inherited a team that had never really been a team. Different projects, different managers over time, no shared identity. I started a Weekly Wrap-Up ritual, which was 30-60 minutes every Friday to connect and learn something together. People who barely talked to each other started showing up for each other. It became the cornerstone of our team culture.

New project, new stakeholders, completely undefined scope. I wrote a brief to pull what was in their heads into the open and get everyone thinking about the experience and tech constraints before jumping to solutions. It's a move I've used more than once.

T-Mobile had eight different navigation patterns living on the same platform. To customers, it created a fragmented experience. Nobody asked me to fix it. I went forward with it, pitched it up the chain, and it actually landed.

I built a competency assessment across 5 core areas: craft, communication, influence, ownership, and engagement. At the individual level, it helped me align people to the right work and set real growth goals. At the team level, it showed us where we had gaps and what to do about them. Through one of the most turbulent periods in T-Mobile's digital history, the team had 100% retention and four promotions.

At MoxiWorks, I needed design help and had no headcount to hire. So I partnered with General Assembly instead. Students worked on real project briefs for us, they got real-world experience, we got fresh thinking. It worked better than expected. I ended up hiring one of the designers full-time and another came on as an intern. No budget required.

I picked it up off Facebook Marketplace as a side project. Got it running for about 20 seconds before realizing one of the replacement parts was wrong. Toasted it for good. Still learned more about how compressors work than I expected to. That was the real goal.

I ran a workshop where I came in with the problem, not the answer. The team built the direction. I kept my mouth shut and facilitated. It was harder than it sounds and better than I expected.

I enrolled three of my designers in an AI Product Design certification through ELVTR. My VP told me I should do it too. She was right. The course pushed me to actually build with AI, not just talk about it. I came out with a mood uplifter app, the seeds of an AI guitar teacher, and a clearer point of view on where AI fits in the design process.

My VP asked me to join her at Deutsche Telekom's Design Summit in Frankfurt and lead a barcamp session. I said yes even though public speaking at that scale wasn't my comfort zone. I pitched my topic in 2 minutes to the room and people decided which sessions they wanted to attend. 10 designers chose mine on the topic of The Cost of Design. We discussed how bad design isn't just an aesthetic problem. It has real business costs and real human ones.