UX Design / Greater Seattle Area
I lead product design teams by connecting user insights to business strategy, empowering designers, and bringing Product and Engineering along as peers throughout the process.
I believe that AI can be a powerful ally in making organizations more user-centric, and that it can create the spaces needed for vital human collaboration.
Selected work
Click below to see more on how the job got done.
Design Manager · Set direction for the practice · Adopted by designers across silos
Built the agents, skills.md workflows, evaluation loops, and shared repo that gave our design org a better way to collaborate with partners across the organization.
Design lead · Pod of 6 · Partnered with Product, Sales Ops & Engineering
Set the vision and roadmap for a compensation experience ecosystem. Helped our product partners work in a more user-centric way; turning them into strong advocates for the way we work.
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Senior Product Designer · Cross-functional collaboration
Led design strategy for a student-success data platform serving everyone from data-science power users to non-technical faculty. Successfully shipped GA and set up continual evaluation loops for further design iteration.
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Creative Director · Built and led cross disciplinary team · Brand management
Stood up the brand and UX language for a category-defining lighting startup; along with the team and systems to produce it.
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Re-imagining a British classic — creative & art direction, brand identity.
Visual identity for the City of Austin's public-art initiative.
Creative direction and coaching spec work on an REI sub-brand.
Rebrand for a legendary Austin record shop.
Building and running an in-house design team across multiple online consumer brands.
Creative direction and team leadership for local non-profits.
How I lead
I lead from a few clear convictions — that a good brief is the result of good teamwork, that design should be done in service of the user, and that AI can help us all work better together.
I hire for judgment, then empower the team to use it.
My team at Cisco consistently ranks highly in employee engagement, and this comes down to focusing on the designer as a whole person, helping them reach their goals, and giving them the sense that they are being heard.
The highest-leverage thing a leader can do is to bring as much clarity to project requirements as possible. This doesn't mean perfection, but it does entail the ability to work across functions and build partnerships based on trust and respect.
For our project team at Cisco, turning ambiguous requirements into clear UX architecture has helped ship multiple features for a large enterprise application on time and within scope.
I treat AI in a design org as a governance question (what gets built, shared, and kept human) first and a tooling question second.
I recently built a governance practice, including agents, skills.md workflows, evaluation loops, and a shared repo, that is being rapidly adopted and leading to productive discussions and less overall chaos.
The strongest design work happens when Design, Product, and Engineering are able to work as a team; not just individuals in a relay race. I always work closely with PM and Eng leadership, and work hard to foster that collaborative space.
Peer partnership on direction and scope moved user sentiment by as much as 15 points on a recent, massive ecosystem-level buildout.
Twenty years in, I still open Figma, still write copy, still prototype with Cursor.
I am fluent across Figma, Figma Make, Cursor, Claude, MCP servers, and the modern AI design stack. I think it helps to get your hands dirty from time to time to work credibly with teams in an era of rapid change.
The part of the job I'm proudest of: people who grow on my teams and leave for bigger jobs.
I grew a designer pipeline across four e-commerce brands at BuildASign — several reports now in design-leadership roles. I have a strong eye for talent and enjoy creating the right conditions to let it shine.
About
My name is Robert; some people call me Bobby. I'm a UX leader living and working in the Seattle area. Twenty years in, my path runs from art and creative direction, through enterprise product design, to leading design teams and the practices that hold them together. I'm strongest where design has to be the connective tissue: combining user insight to business strategy, upholding craft under shipping pressure, and bringing Product and Engineering as colleagues working from a place of mutual respect.
Lately I've been focused on collaboration, human-centered design, and responsible AI deployment across the design workflow. In my free time, I like to watch soccer, play with my dog Chibi, hang out with my fiancé, work on various creative side quests, read probably more than is healthy, and generally overthink things.
Cisco · Blackboard · Ketra (acq. Lutron) · BuildASign · BA, The University of Texas at Austin.
Get in touch
I'm looking for big, complex problems where I can provide UX design management, strategy, or player-coach execution to help move things forward.
