My Career So Far

Along with a small team of independent designers, I helped a large, multinational law firm develop a product to automate the drafting of a family of legal documents. As the lead developer, I built the MVP of our retrieval augmented generation (RAG) web app and scoped the work for building a first rev of the production version.

This was such a stellar opportunity. Amidst a sea of AI hype, we were lucky to work with dedicated clients who valued taking the time to do things right. I’m not an AI sceptic, but I also don’t see it as a panacea. Even as LLMs become more and more mind-blowingly capable each day, I don’t believe they’re a substitute for in-depth user research and detailed design work. On this project, we got to work with brilliantly collaborative clients who helped us learn why they care about what so that we could design an LLM-based product that prioritized information like they do.

I am grateful to have begun my data science career at IDEO because of the foundational training it has provided. Here, I have learned never to fully trust the data; always talk to people to get the full story. I’ve learned that since all problems of prediction boil down to problems of trust, the best solution is usually for your design to communicate humility. Fundamentally, I’ve learned that people problems can only be solved by people solutions. While I’m always eager to code, I’m so grateful to work with people who will back up the data scientist in the room when he says that an algorithm just isn’t the right solution here.

My work here has always centered on learning and teaching. The variety of the work means that each project gifts a new algorithm for me to first learn and then teach my fellow designers so that, together, we can best use it. And while they span industries, IDEO projects are fundamentally about helping clients understand the systems in which they operate and then helping them affect change within those systems.

In my efforts to make this learning interactive, I’ve made a name for myself as the go-to guy for storytelling through simulations. I have always been someone who learns best through doing, so I try to set up the same flow for others. All of my projects aspired to let clients play with inputs and see for themselves their effect on the outputs. Below are some of my favorites of these projects.

Verena Solutions was a small dental start-up, pursuing a novel safety needle concept. I joined the founder as employee number one and took the concept from literal napkin sketches to a manufacturable product. I left as we were handing off production to an automation and manufacturing partner.

To pay the bills, I also built out the consulting arm of our business while the founder focused on our main product. It was here that I learned how to cultivate relationships, scope work, and guide clients past their first idea to their true goal.

One of the many highlights of time at Verena was the mHUB community, the manufacturing-focused co-working space we were based out of. I got to work alongside so many passionate, supportive entrepreneurs. I hope to one day start my own company from such a place.