A leader who never left the craft.
I lead.
I set direction, hire and grow teams, align product and engineering, and hold the quality bar. Teams of more than ten, up to five product teams at once, more than ten startups led, and as a VP both product management and product design.
I design.
I'm still in Figma daily — research, flows, interaction design, design systems, and high-fidelity UI. Simplicity, attention to detail, and usability held of the highest importance, set by example rather than by review.
I build.
I write production HTML and CSS, and increasingly move designs into working prototypes with AI assistance — so we test behaviour early and engineering receives something real instead of a document to interpret.
Visual design to AI product systems.
Each step added a layer rather than replacing one. That accumulation is the reason I can operate across craft, systems, product, and implementation in the same role.
Visual & brand design
Creative direction, identity, print, and web. Where the eye got trained.
UX in regulated software
CareFusion. Healthcare workflows where being wrong has consequences.
UX at consumer scale
Head of UX at loanDepot. The longest form in consumer finance.
Product leadership
VP at Big Purple Dot, owning product and design across a CRM suite.
AI products
Director at Veritone. High-stakes AI with human oversight built in.
Systems & practice
Head of Product Design at Green Street; my own practice, Kirkman & Company.
What I'm unusually good at.
Turning ambiguity into direction
Walking into a problem nobody has framed yet and coming out with a plan the business, the team, and engineering all agree is the plan.
Simplifying complex systems
Institutional real-estate analytics, mortgage underwriting, evidence workflows, supply chain. Dense domains where the difficulty is real and cannot be styled away.
Building systems that scale past me
Design systems, tokens, documentation, and process that hold quality when I am not in the room — which is the only version of quality that survives growth.
Designing AI and human workflows
Knowing where automation helps and where a person has to stay in control — learned on a product where the output goes to the state.
Connecting design to the number
Deciding what success is before designing, then being accountable to it. Adoption, completion time, retention, support load — not opinions about screens.
Three moments that explain the rest.
AI changed the products I design and the way I design them.
AI product UX, human-in-the-loop systems, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted prototyping — plus the parts of the process where I deliberately keep a human in charge.
Adventure keeps the work honest.
I've always been interested in things outside design — businesses, real estate, technology, travel, architecture, investing. Those keep me close to how people actually make decisions and spend money, which is a different education than a design studio provides.
I love the ocean and adventure. When time allows, you'll find my wife and me taking our ocean kayaks out, hiking a trail to the top of a mountain, or flying somewhere new.
Before design, I was a professional skateboard stuntman — Warner Bros' Grind, a Honda commercial, and more. I'm an Eagle Scout, and I lead teams the same way I learned to back then: from the front, leaving it better than I found it.
My story, in numbers
Real estate, investing, and running things myself.
Alongside the design career I invest in commercial real estate and build businesses of my own. It is not a hobby I keep separate from the work — it is the reason I read a P&L before I read a design brief, and the reason I am comfortable in a room full of executives talking about revenue rather than interface.
A CRE investor designing for CRE investors
At Green Street I was designing institutional real-estate analytics while investing in commercial real estate myself. I did not need a research session to understand what a valuation model is for, or why a number three clicks deep is a number nobody checks.
See that work →Operator, not just observer
More than ten startups led, my own design practice run since 2022, and property and business ventures alongside it. Payroll, margins, customers who leave, decisions made with incomplete information — the things product strategy is actually about.
Why it makes me a better designer
Most design debates are really business debates in disguise. Having money at risk in my own ventures makes me quicker to ask what a change is worth, and less precious about work that cannot answer.
A Business Builder's Operating Manual
I write about building and rebuilding businesses. Same instinct as the design work: take something complicated, find the structure underneath it, and hand over a system someone can actually run.
Two decades. Five kinds of problem.
Organised by the kind of problem rather than the logo, because the domain is what transfers.
AI & Public Sector
Regulated, high-stakes, AI in the loop
- Veritone
- Corsearch · Wolters Kluwer
- Law-enforcement reporting
- Human-in-the-loop review
Fintech & Lending
Applications, CRM, and the money moving
- loanDepot
- Big Purple Dot
- Real Genius
- FirstBank Mortgage
Enterprise, Data & B2B
Dense platforms for professional users
- Green Street
- Teradata
- Requis
- Cirrus Insight · Salesforce
Healthcare & High-Stakes
Where being wrong has consequences
- CareFusion · BD
- Kaiser Permanente
- Tricefy
- Premier Nutrition
Consumer, Mobile & Brand
Products and identities people choose
- Simplenight
- Honda · Kia · LG · 3M
- uME iOS app
- Skate & footwear brands
shipped for
Building something ambitious?
I'm interested in senior product design and design leadership roles where complex systems, AI, strong craft, and business strategy intersect. Orange County, San Diego, or remote.