Designer first. I just stopped assuming the thing being designed was the screen. The things I have designed that mattered most never had one: a way of deciding which ideas deserved to become products, a school built around careers instead of courses, teams that carried a strategy after I left.
Vancouver and Salt Spring Island
Ubersuggest, 2021. The value came before the signup.
Chief Product Officer at four companies, three of them full time. I run product, design and engineering as one organization, because in my experience the expensive problems live in the seams between them.
SaaS, games and classrooms taught me to find the real problem there. Agencies taught me that a deadline is a design constraint like any other.
Design, product and engineering in one reporting line is the part that matters more than the headcount. A two-dollar cable undid a product decision worth millions. A different department took it out of the box to save margin. Our part was done.
Swipe sideways to see the whole drawing.
Nobody was wrong.
Nobody owned the whole path.
That is the system half. The other half is the people.
I know the gaps from the inside. The company I ran myself failed on two questions I never asked.
Three people who worked for me, what they were when they wrote it, and where they went.
He is amazing at helping others see their own potential. He loves asking you difficult questions that force deep thought, but will make sure you feel empowered in solving them.Charmie Kim2010 She now leads a game at Supercell.
Miles was instrumental in elevating design as a discipline. He cares so much about the composition of a team, the skills and attitudes necessary to craft a cohesive and driven unit.Denis Suhopoljac2018 My design director at Unbounce. He now leads Asana's design site in Vancouver.
That rare combination of EQ and IQ that allows him to incite trust with those around him. This trust creates space for his teams to safely pursue innovative ideas and to take risks.Chris Brownlee2020 He is now SVP of Product at Yext.
People I have led now run product and design at Pathlock, co-founded GigHound and Bench, design at Grammarly, and lead RBC's Calgary innovation lab. Of forty-five recommendations, only one mentions numbers.
That is the half of the record with the most evidence behind it, and the half that outlasts me.
My job is the conditions.
The careers are theirs.
In 2017 Unbounce closed its Montreal office. It was a hard call at a company that cared about its people, and you could feel it in every room.
We rebuilt from the inside out: leadership attributes first, then culture and ways of working, and only then the brand the outside world saw. The word we landed on was remarkable.
It did more for that company than some of the product decisions I made there, because it held the team together. It is why this is called Remarkable Work.
One thing. Better you know it before you call.
I take on hard problems. The one thing I will not do is help run a different plan from the one a board and a team believe in.
Deciding what a team can carry is judgment. Letting them believe something untrue is not.
I am an underwater photographer, a discipline that rewards anyone who can hold several parts at once: diving well, understanding animal behaviour, reading light you cannot control, and staying calm when none of it is going to plan.
It has one rule I hold myself to here as well: a checkable record. Nobody comes away misled. I taught diving for years before I taught design, and both taught me the same thing: a hard subject goes in one outcome at a time.
Ideas arrive alone, in stillness, and almost none of them survive there. They get built on over food, with other people, when nobody in the room is being measured.
Most companies have engineered the first one out of the working day and never built the second at all, and then wonder why nothing new comes out of a full calendar.
Innovation and creativity happen when the conditions allow for it.
What keeps you up at night?
Chances are I have sat with something like it myself. Start there. We can spend the whole first conversation on it.