Product design and UX strategy with 20+ years in complex enterprise software, from cybersecurity platforms at Fortra to business banking at RBC and merchant payments at Moneris. I design the admin tools, workflows and design systems that make dense products feel simple, and I build in code when that's the fastest way to test an idea.
— 01
The Matrix
A living, non-linear organism.
A product is never just a series of screens; it is a living system. It emerges from an ongoing dialogue between human psychology, scalable architecture, tactile craft, and continuous telemetry.
Discovery
Discovery
Architecture
Architecture
Tactile Craft
Tactile Craft
Telemetry
Telemetry
— 02 · Selected work · Visuals shared under NDA
Selected Work
Self-Serve Administration for RBC Express
A manual, ticket-driven admin process became a self-serve hub where business clients manage their own users, permissions, approvals and security tokens.
Admin changes dropped from 3 to 5 business days to 3 to 5 minutes.
Request a walkthroughAI Help and Support for the Fortra Platform
Help should meet people where they are. An in-product panel and assistant that reads the user's context and gets them to an answer, one of the first AI integration concepts for the platform.
The work is in the edges: where AI genuinely helps, how the conversation flows and where it can go wrong. A clickable prototype and a five-year vision put it on the table.
Request a walkthroughOne Design System for Design and Engineering
For a decade there was no design system, only six separate component libraries and everyone doing their own thing. I defined the way out: one licensed library, shared tokens, a single owner and a workflow that unifies design and engineering.
Direction, evidence and a plan to implement it. Adoption is under way. Projected: 30 to 40% less UI build effort, based on industry benchmarks.
Request a walkthroughAnalytics and Reporting for the Fortra Platform
Reporting should feel like one product, not one per product. A platform-wide vision for analytics across the security portfolio: templates, rebuilt dashboards and reports, embedding in portal pages, scheduling and predictive analysis.
Built around three kinds of user, operational, executive and analytical, and prototyped end to end.
Request a walkthroughBuilding Mona, an AI Framework for Moneris
An organization new to AI needs architecture before agents. I'm setting the framework: one chat entry point that routes each question to the right specialist agent, planned and governed instead of scattered.
Being built now, with a pilot live in Product Enablement and designed as the pattern the rest of the company can follow.
Request a walkthroughLedger, an AI Design Vision
An AI-first vision for how a design team works, built in Figma Make and refined outside it.
Grew out of enabling Figma AI for a pilot group, and sets out how a design team can work AI-first.
Request a walkthroughAxeliq
My own product, taken from idea to a working prototype: product strategy, design and code by one person.
A hands-on look at how I think about product, from the first problem statement to something people can click through.
Request a walkthroughMore work
Moneris
Designed and coded on my own: one place where delivery, metrics, roadmap and AI initiatives live together.
- Scoped around quarterly snapshots and named data owners, so every number has someone accountable
- Built with Claude Code and MCP connections to Figma, Jira and Confluence, so it stays current without manual updates
Product planning deserves a governed source of truth, not a shared spreadsheet. One place for timelines, dependencies and delivery risk.
- Designed the workflow so ideas move through six stages on their own, from submission to delivered, triggered by field entries, sign-offs and linked Jira work
- Added role-based controls and automated weekly reporting that flags status shifts and delivery risk
Design works best as a partnership. A charter with Product and Engineering that puts discovery ahead of delivery and design QA at the release gate.
- Made clear what Product, Design and Engineering each own
- Introduced a visible intake and prioritization model, so the work design takes on is a shared decision
Projected: up to 50% less late-stage rework and 30 to 40% faster alignment, based on industry benchmarks.
Request this walkthroughHow Product, Design and Engineering organize and hand off work in Figma, with one source of truth tied to Jira.
- A three-tier file strategy: a protected core for production, workshop files for active sprints and a shared library
- A migration rule that avoids moving thousands of old files: all new work uses the new structure, and old files move only when touched
The case for a pattern research tool that replaces hand-collected competitor screenshots.
- The research workflow mapped phase by phase, before and after
- A direct answer to "why not just use AI": flows behind logins, hallucinated patterns and no visual fidelity
Projected: about 8 hours down to 4.5 hours of research per feature, for a few thousand dollars a year. Not yet measured.
Request this walkthroughA minimum viable product has to reach meaningful, not just functional. A framework and interactive tools that make that argument tangible.
- The layers of value, from functional to meaningful
- Interactive tools to test it: a sprint simulator, a quick MVP test and a cost-of-rework calculator
Prove it small first. A plan for an assistant that builds merchant-ready packages from approved content only.
- Start with one storyboard, then extract the framework
- Rules that keep it honest: it assembles approved, sourced content and never invents facts
Design direction across merchant products, with hands-on work on checkout and gift cards.
- Clear decline states and a new information architecture for gift cards
- Clickable prototypes, benchmarked against Shopify, Stripe and Square
How Buy Now, Pay Later shows up across online checkout, the counter and the merchant portal, from research through to a pilot.
- Found that billing data was never reaching the providers, which lowers approvals, and corrected the checkout architecture so every provider gets it
- Argued for showing installment pricing earlier in the shopping journey, not only at the final payment step
- Mapped the in-store experience as a service blueprint for the cashier, the shopper and the back end
Bill pay inside the merchant portal: upload an invoice, check the extracted data side by side with the document, then pay one bill or many through approval rules.
- A UX strategy and phased scope that balance a long-term cash flow hub with a smaller first release
- Eight prototype iterations: split-screen validation, a batch payment drawer, approval policies and roles
Two merchant apps become one, organized around what a merchant is doing, not which tool they open.
- The guiding rule: payment is a method, not a destination. Checkout, Inventory, Orders, Customers and More form the structure
- Deep management stays in the web portal and is linked out to, instead of crowding the app
Journey maps for a loyalty program that runs through the merchant portal and checkout: how a merchant sets it up, and how a shopper joins and earns.
- Where adoption would drop: a second login, a rule builder too complex for a small merchant and too many reports
- The fixes: single sign-on, one-click templates, a native member lookup and three headline metrics
Settings for every terminal across a chain, from one place: change one location or apply changes to many.
- A settings router that makes the scope unmistakable: one location or the whole chain
- Batch edit across locations, with settings locked by the chain where needed
What reporting a new retail portal needs, from a small merchant's daily summary to an enterprise account's deep data tools.
- Benchmarked reporting across leading payment platforms
- Tiered requirements, and a plan to bring web, mobile and terminal data into one retail view that can plug into the future unified portal
One shared set of personas for the whole payments ecosystem: the buyers, the daily users and the customer at the terminal.
- Each persona's motivations, frustrations, success measures and touchpoints, kept as a living reference for Product, Design and Engineering
- An AI helper prototype that drafts user stories and acceptance criteria in a chosen persona's voice
Fortra and PhishLabs
The Figma component library behind Fortra's design system, kept in step with the React components engineering shipped.
- Built on MUI and Material Design
- Adopted by the whole design team as its standard library
One tool for managing notification templates across products and clients.
- Search and filter by service and client, with a visual and code editor
- Test sends, cloning and controls over who can clone
Rethinking how customers find documentation, downloads and the right support path across a large product portfolio.
- A search-first entry point with an explore-by-product view
- Product pages that bring knowledge base, downloads and roadmap together
- A case list with clear statuses, and request-access for products
A universal model for email security incidents: how events group into campaigns and threats, and how analysts review and close them.
- Work queues and an investigation view with threat indicators and a full activity trail
- A clear status model from reported to closed
An admin tool for setting up clients, products, services and service orders.
- Lifecycle states from draft to retired, with versioning
- An expiring-soon view for service orders
RBC and earlier
Business clients can follow international wires end to end, with concepts tested through client interviews.
- A payment hub showing each wire's status and amounts
- The UX strategy for RBC's adoption of SWIFT gpi tracking
A new concept for RBC Express on mobile, grounded in a heuristic review and a benchmark of leading business banking apps.
- The app reviewed against heuristics and leading competitors
- A concept built on RBC's mobile design system, with task-based flows
Owned from first idea to launch: a guided public payment flow, a government back-office portal and a design system built from scratch.
- A responsive, step-by-step flow replacing a pop-up based interface
- A design system built to WCAG standards
A redesigned member portal and an interactive financial planning tool.
- The portal's structure and key journeys, rethought
- Tested with members and advisors
Brought in as the UX fix for a B2B wholesale marketplace where retailers buy by the case, from many brands, on payment terms. I unified the design system, re-envisioned the buyer app and reworked checkout.
- Unified the design system and component library, so every screen drew from one set of patterns
- Re-envisioned the buyer app end to end: onboarding that verifies a retail business, a cart grouped by brand, order tracking with net-60 terms, product and brand pages, and invoices
- Optimized the checkout flows, including a mobile quick checkout
Post-release surveys on onboarding and checkout scored 9.8 out of 10, up from scores of 3 to 5 before.
Request this walkthrough
AI model training
Expert review to help train a frontier AI model on product design and front-end quality.
- Model-generated designs critiqued against their prompts, with the evidence used for training
- AI-generated front-end code and UI reviewed, with prompts iterated until the output met quality standards
Under NDA
Most of this work is under NDA, so I walk through it live, with the screens, prototypes and research behind it.
— 03 · Expertise
The craft behind the work.
Software this dense rarely feels simple by accident. Six disciplines, from the first conversation to the last detail.
Dense, high-stakes software that feels simple.
Admin consoles, payments, reporting and data-heavy workflows. I map how the work really gets done, then remove steps until the product explains itself.
Seen inRBC ExpressFortra analytics
Libraries, tokens and the rules that keep them alive.
Component libraries, design tokens and the governance around them: ownership, contribution, versioning and accessibility, so design and code stay in step as teams grow.
Seen inDesign system business case
Direction, operating models and the business case behind them.
Product vision, roadmaps, operating models and business cases, plus mentoring designers and aligning product, engineering and leadership. Strategy close enough to the craft to be built.
Designing assistants, and designing with them.
Conversational and agent experiences, AI-assisted workflows and the guardrails that make them trustworthy, from first concept to pilot. I also design and prototype with AI myself.
Seen inFortra AI helpMona
Evidence over opinion, before and after launch.
Interviews, field studies, usability and A/B testing before launch, then analytics, telemetry and session data after, so every decision starts from evidence.
Seen inRBC ExpressFortra analytics
Built in from the first sketch, not audited at the end.
WCAG and AODA from the first requirements through testing, built into the design system and delivery pipeline so accessibility holds as the product grows.
Seen inDesign system business case
Design isn't just a career.
It's how I interpret the world.
My foundation was built writing code on a Commodore Amiga and studying Systems Engineering, giving me the technical leverage to partner directly with engineering leadership, ensuring strategic vision survives the transition into shipped code.
Whether I'm studying visual arts, deeply engaged in the local live music scene, or gaining new perspectives traveling the globe, everything feeds back into my craft. When I'm not consulting for tech leaders or scaling design organizations, you can usually find me somewhere quiet, likely befriending a local stray cat.
Finding clarity in the analog world.
