Leadership is a practice. I earn it every day by staying close to the work, seeing the whole system clearly, and building enough trust that people can think and make without asking permission first.

I care about people the way I care about product: closely, and down to the details that actually matter. Good leadership makes room to play, to get things wrong, and to come back sharper. That's how strong work gets made and how strong teams get built.

Impact builds trust. Clarity builds trust. I build teams around both, so people hold themselves accountable because they understand exactly what we're making and why.

I've stepped into leadership roles throughout my career in product design, regardless of what my title said. For most of it, I've worked as both a hands-on design lead and a people manager, flexing between player-coach and full manager depending on what the team and the business need.

I stay close to the work because that's where the judgment lives. The best part of the job is watching someone I've hired or mentored outgrow what I taught them.

I grew up around magicians. What people miss about a good trick is how much deliberate work sits underneath it. The angles, the timing, what the audience is allowed to see and exactly when. It looks effortless because someone spent months making sure it couldn't fail in front of a room.

AI gets treated like magic right now, minus the workshop. The further you sit from the work, the more it looks that way, and magic doesn't come with a spec. So the mandate lands, the work starts, and the question of what problem it actually solves turns up somewhere after the ship date.

I build with these tools, so I know how the trick works. Every AI feature I've seen hold up came from the same place: somebody decided what problem they were solving, who owned the call, and what the person on the other end could see, question, and undo. All of it argued over before anything got built. That's intentional design, and it's the part I'm good at.

So I wrote down how I navigate it. Nine questions I keep running teams through, one for each decision that tends to go sideways, each with the shortest version of what I'd actually do.

Longer pieces on design leadership, AI, and the work itself. New writing lands on Medium first.