Design that moves
operations forward.

A dual-sided product: consumer protection + insurance intelligence

Greenlight launched as a phone-based dashcam platform requiring zero hardware installation, just a charging cradle every driver already had. The app ran continuous loop recording and triggered automatic event capture on hard braking or accident detection, creating an always-on protection layer for drivers without friction.

In parallel, a separate product surface streamed real driver telemetry to insurance partners, enabling them to identify and reward genuinely safe drivers through actual behavioral data rather than actuarial proxies. One device, two distinct products, one platform architecture.

Discovery through partnership: the fleet opportunity

During insurance partnership development, a pattern emerged in the conversations: fleet managers needed exactly what the insurance product was doing, but applied internally to their own drivers. The market signal came from listening, not from internal roadmap pressure.

My background in hardware-driven software experiences at Microsoft provided the systems design framework to architect the pivot properly, not as a feature addition, but as a platform reorientation with distinct UX layers for each stakeholder.

Three distinct stakeholders, one platform

The design challenge in fleet telematics isn't the data. It's relevance. The same telemetry has to feel purpose-built for a driver focused on their score, a fleet manager focused on their risk exposure, and an insurer focused on their book. One platform, three native experiences.

Add fleet counts, driver counts, or retention metrics here when available.

The hardest conditions a design leader can operate in

Neon Machine was building Shrapnel, a AAA blockchain-based extraction FPS, at the intersection of two industries that simultaneously entered historic downturns. Crypto winter collapsed the web3 market. A broader game industry contraction followed. The company went through three CEO changes, the departure or removal of all original founders, and multiple rounds of scaling up then down then up then down again.

Through all of it, the design organization had to maintain vision coherence, team morale, product momentum, and stakeholder confidence. That took more than design management. It took executive leadership through constant change.

Key studio leadership: 10 founders to 150+, design org at ~40 people

Joined at inception as a non-founder early team member and built the experience organization from the ground up, defining the team structure, hiring philosophy, discipline mix, and operating model that would need to scale rapidly and then survive significant contraction without losing its core.

At peak scale, Design Managers, Art Directors, and Development Managers all reported directly into the experience organization, spanning internal FTEs, contractors, and third-party development partners. The org covered the full experience surface: in-game UX, out-of-game product, marketplace, ecosystem, and all external brand and communications channels.

Two brand identities across the product arc

Led two full rebrands. The first got Shrapnel into the market. The second reflected what we learned once we got there.

Product ownership across the full ecosystem

As head of experience, product ownership wasn't limited to design direction. I defined vision, built the teams, and guided concept through delivery across every major product surface.

Design leadership in conditions that test organizational resilience

Shrapnel isn't a game design story. It's a story about keeping a team pointed in the right direction when everything around you is in flux. Maintaining a coherent product vision through three CEOs requires that the vision live in the design organization, not in any individual leader above it. Surviving two simultaneous industry crashes requires that the team's identity be rooted in craft and mission, not market momentum. Keeping talent through scale-down cycles requires that people believe in both the work and the leadership.

Shrapnel is one of five blockchain games selected for China's national launch. That result belongs to the team that kept executing through three leadership changes. The design org is that team.

Real estate at Microsoft scale runs blind without real-time occupancy data

Microsoft's campus buildings were being operated on schedule and assumption. HVAC, electrical systems, and infrastructure ran at capacity regardless of actual occupancy. The opportunity was clear: replace schedule-based building operations with real-world occupancy data to drive intelligent run-up and run-down of building systems, reducing operational costs across an entire campus portfolio.

The challenge was that no affordable, deployable sensor platform existed that could be designed, manufactured, and rolled out at Microsoft campus scale. We had to build it.

Four distinct stakeholders, two product surfaces

Four stakeholders, one data platform. The design challenge was building surfaces that felt native to each without fracturing the underlying system.

Six real-time signal types, each requiring its own design thinking

The sensor array wasn't a commodity component selection. Each signal type introduced distinct design challenges around data interpretation, user-facing representation, privacy, and the gap between raw measurement and actionable insight.

End-to-end: from sensor hardware to software experience

We didn't pick up a sensor SDK and design around it. We designed the sensor, the enclosure, the deployment process, and every screen above it. My team owned every layer from the physical object in the ceiling to the executive dashboard on the screen.

The customer isn't always who you think

After our first sensor deployment, I tracked installation time and went back to the person who mattered most for that problem, not a business stakeholder, but the installer. The guy who'd spent eight hours bent in a drop ceiling told me he was so sore at the end of each day that he couldn't play with his daughter when he got home.

I took that back to the work. We redesigned the installation process and the hardware mounting around his physical reality. After our next large deployment, over 100 sensor arrays in a single evening, he came in the following morning and hugged me. "Thank you for making this so easy. I was able to play with my daughter last night for the first time in a long time."

Per-unit installation time dropped from approximately 15 minutes to 3 minutes. The number is useful. The thing that stuck was simpler: the person whose life your product touches most directly is always a customer, whether or not they show up on a stakeholder map.

Investing in early-career talent

The team I built included Microsoft Accelerated College Hires (MACH) — recent graduates just entering their careers. Over two years together, I invested as heavily in their development as in the product itself: building skills, building confidence, and building the team culture that made the work better. At the end of the engagement, my MACH team members nominated me across all MACH-supporting teams at Microsoft for the Top Mentor award. I won.

Specific figures available in conversation under NDA.

A camera that knew what it was filming

Contour had cameras in market and a recognized brand in the action sports space. My mandate was to build the team and deliver the next generation: a direct GoPro competitor with GPS and 6-axis motion data captured continuously alongside the video recording, turning the camera into a sensor platform rather than just a capture device. The hardware team I built and led included talent recruited specifically from Dyson's design organization, bringing industrial design rigor from one of the most hardware-obsessed companies in the world.

The camera, app, and editing software were designed as an integrated ecosystem, not a camera that happened to have an app, but a platform where the sensor data captured during recording became the raw material for entirely new product experiences.

Sensor metadata as a product foundation

The GPS and 6-axis data logged during every recording session contained a complete behavioral record of what happened during that footage: speed, altitude, g-forces, heading, and rate of change across all axes. The question I kept asking was: what can we build from this data that the video alone can't give you?

The origin of a career-long design philosophy

The new product line was designed, prototyped, and ready for production. The funding round to take it there fell through, and Contour made the strategic decision to close. But the thinking it produced never left. The conviction that sensors generate data, data reveals what people actually do, and that's where the real product opportunities live. That conviction runs directly through the Microsoft Campus of Tomorrow platform, through Greenlight's driver telemetry system, and into every physical operations product I've touched since.

The category has changed. The philosophy hasn't: build products from what the data knows.