About
I started in technical support at a startup called Dynamic Trade, straight out of Indiana University. It became Performics, I moved into front-end development, and then the company was acquired twice: by DoubleClick in 2004, where the work started including design, and by Google in 2008.
Fifteen years at Google followed, all of it in ads. I started managing designers in 2011. In February 2024 I joined The Trade Desk as a principal designer, and founded Harbor, their first design system.
For about seven years now the work has been almost entirely design systems. Two things I have noticed about it. Most of it is not design. And none of it works unless people who do not report to you decide to use it.
That second one is why the two pages below exist. They are other people's words, not mine.
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Peers
Engineers, program managers and designers on other teams, most of them outside my organization.
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Manager Feedback
Anonymous comments from people who reported to me, from Google's annual manager survey.