I’m a senior strategic advisor specializing in non-traditional problem solving. My areas of practice include systems thinking, design strategy, product innovation, and cultural research.

With 10+ years experience in corporate design leadership, entrepreneurship, agency and freelance consulting, I can flow between the consultant’s liberated creativity and the client’s grounded pragmatism.

I genuinely care about the people I work with and seek to associate with self-aware teams that prioritize human and environmental wellbeing. Some of the industries I work with are education, financial services, management consulting, blockchain, and technology services.

When not at the desk, you can find me meditating, writing, traveling, curating playlists, and spinning records.

Let's begin a conversation.

M Y M A N T R A

“Seriousness with the intent

Playfulness with the approach

Compassion with the outcome”

The generalist’s toolkit

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.” - William James

I’ve pursued a career weaving together specializations and skills that dance between creativity, structure, humanities, and science. As a common thread, I’ve sought to deeply empathize with humans, develop an instinct for their deeper needs, and materialize solutions that improve theirs, and the planet’s wellbeing.

As a generalist, I can work with your team to define what kind of role that best suits your organizational structure, strategic priorities, and needs.

  • Orchestrate diverse teams and stakeholders to achieve coordinated progress, attaining clear goals and experiencing professional/personal growth.

  • Steward the design process of a product, service or experience - from ideation to scaled implementation - so that it meets key customer needs and business criteria.

  • Inquire into the psycho-social and ontological underpinnings of a project to deliver contextually appropriate and culturally relevant strategies.

  • Use participatory design thinking to ideate, prototype, develop and scale profitable and positively impactful business models.

  • Design and implement the end-to-end experience journey of defined human archetypes interacting with a product, service or technology.

  • Lead UX production teams to develop, test, and launch product or feature ideas. (digital & analog)

  • Combine methodologies of ethnography, UX research, and qualitative analysis to uncover deep human insights and affect change.

  • Plan and lead participatory co-creation sessions where diverse stakeholders can reach strategic alignment and confident decision making.

Senior-level Skills

  • Funded “Creative Canvas” : Colombia’s first on-demand canvas printing company. Scaled production to meet institutional demand, and grew operations to cover LATAM, US, and Europe markets. Employed 8 full-time contributors.

    Funded “The New Boheme”:
    A community-centered, immersive event series in New York City, in partnership with collaborators from The New York Times, MOMA, Goldman Sachs, Google, and more.

  • Taught guest lectures on the topics of Design Thinking, Innovation, and Product Development at Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, University of Washington, California College of The Arts, Tecnológico de Monterrey, and others.

    Wrote featured articles and white papers for publications such as Fast Company, Triple Pundit, and the Service Design Journal.

    Have given panels and main-stage talks with AIGA, IDSA , IXDA, All Tech is Human, UX Strategy, The Seattle Design Festival, and others.

  • Completed 400+ hours of training on somatic practices (yoga, dancing) with an emphasis on using this tools to improve the relationship to self and others.

  • Founded, funded, and scaled Capital Bank’s nation-wide Mindfulness Program.

    Brought weekly yoga classes to over 100+ weekly associates during the pandemic.

    Taught “Mindfulness for Leaders” classes for the bank’s Executive Leadership Development Program.

    Have 100+ hours of official training in Self-inquiry meditation, Insight (vipassana) meditation, and Metta (loving kindness) meditation.

  • Manage a community of 250+ New Yorkers who gather to experience arts and culture together. Have coordinated the booking of entire theaters, sculpture parks, and cinemas for the community.

    Fostered “The New Boheme” a community of intellectuals, artists, creators, and dot-connectors who are interested in exploring the full breadth of the human condition.

    Organized and participated of intentional-living communities extending from 2-4 months in the US, and Mexico.

  • Envisioned and produced multiple experiential / immersive philosophical salons (35 -120 participants) with The New Boheme
    .
    Co-produced an international wellness micro-festival (75 participants) and a participatory music and arts festival (600 participants)

  • Fully bilingual in English and Spanish. Can speak and write in advanced German, and hold basic conversations in French.

  • Have a side-career as an internationally performing DJ under the moniker “VeloVelo”.

Unique Skills

D A I L Y R E M I N D E R

“In work, as in life, the goal is to become confused at an ever-more sophisticated level.”

- Steve Diller, Graduate School teacher, and CEO at Scansion

Recent Work
Freelance Consulting

In September 2021, I embarked on a lifestyle whereby a consulting practice could support my mission of acquiring new skills, doing personal development work, cultivating mindfulness, and traveling. I had the privilege to honor my “no’s” and only take on projects that felt meaningful, intellectually stimulating, and worth the while. Here’s a list of my favorite engagements.

Innovation & Psychological Safety

Partnered with The United Nation’s Innovation Bootcamp in Munich, Germany to develop effective solutions addressing sexual harassment issues across global UN agencies. Coached a team of international collaborators to define their problem space, user personas, stakeholder maps, current and future-state customer journeys, theory of change, and operating assumptions to develop a testing plan and a product development roadmap. The teams received initial funding to prototype their ideas further.

Design Thinking / Facilitation / Digital Innovation

Business Design for Web 3.0

Trend & Opportunity Analysis / Concept Ideation / Business Design

Conducted early-stage product ideation and business design for an established publishing company seeking to break into the Blockchain Industry. After 20 years in digital publishing, the company’s leadership wanted to learn about opportunities to bring their business into Web 3.0. My work provided the executive team with thorough technological, cultural, and business opportunity analyses, as well as five concrete product concepts to prototype and invest in. I’ve since re-joined the company as advisor to assist with the development and implementation of one of these concepts.

Strategic Planning for Big Tech

Business + Operations Strategy / Service Design / C-Level Facilitation

Supported the development of a next-generation digital customer experience platform, for a major B2B fraud prevention and identity verification company. Facilitated stakeholder alignment and operational agreements across diverse business and technology functions, using Strategic Design methodologies (service blueprinting, roadmap prioritization, CX enhancement audits, and others). Led a series of participatory workshops (with 20+ senior executives) to advance key strategic agenda. The resulting output is now the backbone for their MVP release roadmap.

Cultural Research & Ethnography

Ethnography / Qualitative Research Planning + Synthesis / Cultural Strategy

Co-led a field ethnographic research study to learn about the experience of undocumented immigrants seeking political asylum in Austin, TX. The insights focused on understanding the community’s Relationship to Self and Others, Needs, Aspirations, Motivations, Hardships and Adaptations. The client was a Fortune 500 company that sought to understand the lived reality of intersectional communities who live under discrimination and neglect, so they may humanize their brands more. Our findings were escalated and presented directly to the organization’s CMO.

Past Work
Corporate and Agency

Before beginning my stint as a freelance consultant, I worked almost six years as Sr. Design Strategy Manager at Capital One Bank. During that time, I bounced from internal strategy consulting, to teaching hundreds of executives about design thinking, to leading an R&D lab, and owning a portfolio of products related to financial wellbeing.

Before Capital One, I worked as a Senior Experience Strategist for Seattle-based product innovation consulting agency Artefact Studio.

Moving from Post-it Idea to Award-Winning Product

Product Development / Innovation / UX Research / Brand Strategy / Cultural Strategy

While leading the Design Strategy practice for Capital One’s Research & Development Lab, our team set out to explore opportunities on the family finances space. The bank had a legacy account for kids, without much traction, and we were noticing how new Fin-techs were quickly emerging in that space.

For the following 3 years, I supported the team to:

  • Conduct foundational ethnographic research to understand the financial realities of families across geographies, income levels, and needs.

  • Run open-ended concept ideation, and synthesize into low-fidelity wireframes and digital prototypes.

  • Align on key value propositions and core features to take into an MVP program.

  • Testing MVP and subsequent iterations, collecting data and making a business case for full-stack development.

  • Develop brand strategy, guidelines and asset libraries to launch product into test markets.

  • Oversee scale from test market into full release.

The results:

  • A post-it idea, incubated at the R&D lab, grew into a new product line supported by a full-time team of over 30 associates.

  • Transformed a dormant financial product into a company example of innovation.

  • Launched digital product to market with 40% YoY growth

  • Received rewards and accolades from NerdWallet, Forbes, Fast Company, and others.

AI/ML Assisted Behavior Change

AI/ML / UX Research / UX Design / Innovation / R&D Funding

During my time lat the R&D Lab at Capital One, a team of technologists, behavioral scientists, and myself became interested in the possibilities of deriving accurate personality trait predictions from financial data. Such an advancement could enable customers to improve their savings habits through “nudges” delivered with a communication style that matched their dominant personality.

As lead on this project, my role was to:

  • Stand up a project plan for early technology, design, and scientific research.

  • Present the initiative to executive leaders, and fund the project.

  • Enroll and manage a team of subject matter experts to support the investigation.

  • Develop differential UX design concepts based on personality science.

  • Write a research plan to test early hypotheses.

  • Create UX prototypes, lead recruitment, and lead lab testing.

  • Work with AI/ML partners to audit feasibility and develop tech roadmap.

  • Develop and implement ethical guidelines at every step of the process

  • Socialize progress, internally promote initiative, and raise awareness.

The results:

  • The initiative showed promising results, both on the technical feasibility, as well as staggeringly positive reactions to the UX tests.

  • The initiative was halted due to reputation risks inherent to the interactions between personality science and AI/ML. (Cambridge Analytica had just hit the news)

  • Through this project, I became an advocate for the ethical use of AI. This case study landed me a position as Chief Editor for The Trusted Data and Artificial Intelligence System Playbook for Financial Services, published by IEEE in 2021

Impact Investment meets HCD

Business Strategy / Human Centered Design / Systems Thinking / Implementation

While working as a Sr. Experience Strategy Consultant for Artefact Studio, our team engaged with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in the capacity of strategic advisors to the Global Health Department.

The project aimed to identify efficiency gaps in the program’s investment pipeline, and propose improvement solutions. Our team identified that early-stage grantees were having mixed success with implementation. The research phase illustrated how grantees were failing to deliver on their plans because they lacked foundational knowledge about their users and the cultural systems in which they operated.

Our team developed a sprint-based approach to develop a diagnostic tool that would enable auditors to understand whether grantee programs had significant knowledge gaps about their end-users and the cultural systems they inhabited. If these gaps were flagged, grantees were paired with third party vendors specializing in human-centered-design and systems-thinking that would support them in gaining the necessary knowledge to de-risk their seed investment and increase chances of implementation success.

The results:

  • The client celebrated our innovative and insights-led approach to investment risk strategy.

  • The team took into consideration digital technology constraints in target program areas, and developed all solutions and tools to be used in paper.

  • The resulting grantee diagnostic program was piloted and deployed in field.

  • The CIO socialized this project to encourage the demand for more design strategy engagements across the foundation.

Other Work
Passion Projects

A website about me would be incomplete without including the side-projects where I pour my heart into, without concern for financial retribution, career alignment or objective success. The following list of projects I do simply because I love them.

The New Boheme

Entrepreneurship / Community Leadership / Event Production

Founded a global community of generalists interested in exploring the full breadth of the human condition. Produced experience-centered cultural events, revolving around the participatory exploration of philosophical themes. Facilitated discussions with speakers from Goldman Sachs, Google, MOMA, and The New York Times. Sponsored cultural acts including live music, poetry, dance, workshops and theater.