Designing the experience is half the job.

1. I design for adoption from day one.

I plan for how people will find, understand, and use the work before it launches, and then I measure whether they do. At GSA, I restructured FedIDcard.gov around the tasks people actually come to do, and task completion rose 87%, verified in usability testing rather than asserted in a deck. On HR Links, I rewrote 125 outdated guides as plain-language pages, and 80-90% of visitors engaged with the guides. At DTIC, a program of coordinated campaigns grew registered users 59%, more than four times the previous record annual increase.

2. I find the real problem, not the stated one.

At DTIC, leadership had accepted flat growth as a fact of a niche market. The real problem was that users could not tell where the free content ended and the far more valuable gated content began. Everyone knew. It had become furniture. Before asking for any budget, I tested the idea with one low-cost email. It proved the point and earned the funding for everything after it: segmentation, reactivation, the redesign, the events program. I would rather be proven wrong in a week for free than in a year for six figures. Read the case study

At the State Department, everyone had a theory about why travel reimbursement was slow. The service blueprint showed the real breakdown: the booking and reimbursement systems didn't talk to each other. Read the case study

3. I create solutions that haven't been built before.

Employers in all three sectors have trusted me with projects that had no precedent or template.

• Two federal emergency preparedness campaigns. The Navy's Operation Prepare, which still runs today as Ready Navy, and the Army's own Ready Army, which Battelle won as an expanded follow-on contract on the strength of the Navy work. I led creative strategy for both.
• A communications department built from nothing. JPM-TMT had no communications function. I built the brand, the message architecture, and the digital presence, led a team of six, and ran a $3M budget. I grew its mailing list from zero to about 3,500 contacts across academia, industry, nonprofits, and government, and started the program's first newsletters, one external and one internal.
• A classified reading room, revived and then taken mobile. DTIC's onsite classified reading room drew fewer than five visit requests a month. Within three months of my promoting it online and at conferences, it drew 10+ a month and became a permanent program. I then originated DoD's first mobile classified reading room, piloted in 2020 with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command after a six-month negotiation. It became a fixture at that command's annual science and technology conference, returning in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
• DTIC's first customer journey marketing strategy. The one that produced the 59%.
• DTIC's first campaign attribution system. Before it, DTIC couldn't tell which channels and efforts were worth the money. The metrics team adopted it as its template for reporting to DTIC's senior leaders.
• DTIC's first voice-of-customer program. I turned the User Council into a standing source of customer feedback, with beta testing and an annual symposium. Nominations for its officer seats rose 180%.
• Arlington County's first major job fair. I conceived, named, and planned JobFest: 400+ job seekers, 25 employers and exhibitors, speakers, speed networking, and onsite resume reviews. Radio stations and newspapers ran our ads free as public service announcements, and The Washington Post and three local papers covered it. The pattern started early.

I didn't plan this path, but I see it clearly now. If something new needs to be built and no one is sure what it should look like, that's where I do my best work.