When customer signal is messy, I help turn it into a product decision that moves your team forward

I've spent 15+ years building products, designing services, and leading teams across startups and larger organizations. In that time, I've learned that having customer evidence and knowing what to do with it are two very different things.

I use product strategy, service design, and customer evidence to help teams make clearer decisions about what to build, who it's for, and how it should work. My work spans research, facilitation, experience strategy, and implementation, hands-on where it helps.

Today, through How This Works co, I'm working mainly with early-stage teams on consequential product or go-to-market decisions. I bring the people making the call into the same customer conversations live so they can suss out what they've heard and decide what to do next together.

Selected work

These are mostly stories about the moment the evidence changed the direction: who the team thought the customer was, what the experience needed to do, what had to change around it, what got built or dropped, or which decision finally became possible.

Replay customer hypotheses narrowed across five cycles

Replay

Customer discovery & product strategy · Developer tools · 2025–present

Karmascore case study coming soon

Karmascore

Fractional product leadership & design strategy · Wellness · Jun 2025–present

Shared portfolio view for Duke Energy’s Emerging Technologies Office (ETO)

Duke Energy

Design leadership & product strategy, SoftServe · Energy · Nov 2022–Jul 2024

Shep browser extension for enterprise travel

Shep (acquired)

Fractional product & design leadership · Travel tech · 2017–2021

Sesame booking flow tested before launch

Sesame

Founding product design & customer research · Healthcare · Aug 2018–Aug 2019

Two children looking through a cardboard tube while building a blanket fort

Acme

Service design & customer research, Fjord · Consumer financial services · 2017

Shared portfolio view for Cigna smart toothbrush case study

Smart toothbrush

Product strategy & experience design, SoftServe for Cigna · Healthcare · Apr 2022

View through a large window over Kyiv, Ukraine, with autumn trees and a monument in the distance

SoftServe

Design leadership & practice building · Enterprise consulting · 2021–2024

Tablet on a desk showing the Bank of America commercial banker dashboard, with client relationship revenue, credit rating, and deal details

Commercial bank CRM

Service design & product design, Fjord for Bank of America · Financial services · 2017

Connected phone mockups of the Bank of America investor-research app, showing My Feed, Find, Report, and Event screens

Bank investor research

Product design & customer research, Fjord for Bank of America · Financial services · 2018

When I'm most useful

I’m most useful when a team has plenty of customer information but no clean way to decide what it means for the next product, positioning, or service decision.

That might mean working through several plausible versions of the customer, conflicting interpretations of the same evidence, or a product team moving quickly without knowing whether the customer hypothesis still holds.

The work can take the shape of a Listening Cycle, a fuller featured Bullseye Customer Sprint, or a fractional engagement. The format and mode change but the job is the same: get closer to the evidence, make sense of it together, and turn it into a decision the team can act on.

I came into this through UX and service design, and that 100% shapes how I operate. I lean into the messy, complicated bits where several actors, channels, or teams are involved and the right response isn’t obvious. That can mean research and framing, journeys or service models, facilitated decisions, concepts and prototypes, and enough implementation thinking that the work doesn’t stop at the feel good vibes of a workshop.

AI helps me work across larger evidence sets and move faster through synthesis, but direct customer evidence and human judgment stay at the center.

Skipper facilitating a problem-framing workshop with a product team

Book a time

Bring the customer, product, positioning, or service decision that’s getting harder to answer from inside the team.

We’ll look at what you know, what you’re assuming, and what might help make the next call.

25 minutes, no scoping pitch.

Skipper in Marin County, just north of San Francisco

Where am I?

Marin County, CA · Pacific time