Boeing Digital had no design function, no design culture, and no blueprint — inside a 1,800-person engineering enterprise that treated design as a finishing step, not a strategic investment.

The starting point was a business case built on three arguments: design investment would grow revenue, reduce investment risk by catching problems earlier in the delivery cycle, and create competitive differentiation that would be difficult to match — pitched to the CEO and CFO, and won. Building the function required cross-functional partnerships from day one — design embedded directly inside product, engineering, and customer success teams rather than treated as a downstream execution function, ensuring alignment at every stage of delivery. The org scaled from zero to 115 people across five global locations; co-founded Boeing’s UX Center of Excellence to institutionalize craft practice and standards across the enterprise. When the delivery process itself became the bottleneck, co-led a McKinsey-partnered SAFe PDLC redesign across 39 product teams — saving $4.5M in R&D OpEx and cutting time-to-market 4–6 weeks per product — then co-led an Empowered Teams rollout, giving teams autonomy over intended customer outcomes and removing external dependencies entirely.

The result: a 26-point NPS lift, 12% NRR growth, and 2.7% attrition held through sustained M&A and a PE carve-out — design elevated from a finishing step to a direct CEO report.

In regulated industries, the leaders who define markets are the ones who commit to what's next before the market asks for it — and earn the advantage when the market catches up.

That approach has driven innovation across three eras. In 2011, launched Mobile FliteDeck Pro as the aviation industry's first iPad-certified Electronic Flight Bag — replacing the 40-pound suitcase of paper charts pilots carried on every flight with a 1-pound iPad — in partnership with Apple, years before enterprise mobile was standard practice — becoming the industry standard for commercial airlines worldwide. Through the decade that followed, built the enterprise design system across four phases and established Boeing's presence inside Apple's Enterprise Design Labs, co-founding four global studios that powered the industry's first aviation Design Sprint program — 70+ workshops, $25M in new ARR was committed by airlines during sessions. Most recently: secured early access to Figma's AI pipeline as the first aviation company in the program — delivering 60% engineering velocity gains and $2.4M in annual savings — co-led Boeing Digital's first enterprise AI application, pioneered agentic AI design language in production aviation operations, and led development of Apple Vision Pro AR guided workflows in maintenance, extending the user experience from mobile to spatial computing.

The most effective design leaders don't just support the product roadmap — they help define it. Across Jeppesen, Boeing Digital, and Fiserv, that has meant owning product launches, managing product and eCommerce P&L, and building the customer intelligence infrastructure that converts insight into product decisions driving acquisition, retention, and revenue growth.

That meant building the measurement infrastructure before claiming the credit: a VoC program scaled to 39 product teams, an end-to-end customer journey framework with measured moments that matter, and CX analytics embedded directly in product OKRs. The outcomes followed — CSAT from 2.8 to 4.5, NPS up 26 points, 12% NRR growth in partnership with Customer Success. The same accountability model drove eCommerce results: JeppDirect scaled at a 129% CAGR with an 18% simultaneous cost reduction; and at Fiserv, earlier in the career, $94M in platform CAGR growth across a B2B and B2C financial services portfolio. Different industries, same thesis: when design connects to the metrics that run the business, it stops being a support function and starts earning a seat at the table by moving the metrics that matter.