Problem first.
Everything else second.
What I'm here to do.
Most companies hiring right now are looking for a designer who can operate without hand-holding. Someone who's done this before, knows how to run a discovery process, can sit in a room with engineers and product managers and actually move things forward. That's the work I've been doing for the past several years at ClearGov, designing financial budgeting products for local governments across all 50 states. Complex workflows, regulated environments, users who don't have time for friction. It's a good environment to learn what actually matters in design.
Where I do my best work.
I spent time in a Director role, and I learned a lot from it. But I also learned where I'm most useful. The work I care about, and where the clearest value I bring shows up, is at the IC level: close to the problem, close to users, close to the cross-functional team. That's not a step down from leadership. It's a different kind of leadership, and right now, with AI changing how fast teams need to move and what they need from designers, I think hands-on senior contributors are more valuable than ever. Companies don't need more process management. They need people who can execute with judgment.
How I approach the work.
Before any direction is set, there are things the team needs to agree on. What problem are we actually solving? Who's dealing with it, and in what context? What's the scope and what are the constraints? And how will we know if we got it right? Those aren't intake questions. They're the filter everything else runs through. I've seen projects go sideways not because the design was bad, but because the team never had a shared answer to those questions in the first place.
My process is built around getting to that shared understanding early, before the work gets expensive to change. That usually means facilitated sessions with product and engineering, users, and a lot of listening before a single sketch, pixel or line of code is created. The goal isn't to slow things down. It's to make sure we're moving fast in the right direction.