Commonstock

The first job was the team. I grew the design function from a single inherited designer to a three-person team, which meant hiring at both ends of the experience spectrum and building the rituals that turn a collection of designers into a function with shared standards and judgment.

The second job was the design system. The component library had accumulated without a coherent architecture. Common patterns had diverged across features, spacing and type scales were inconsistent, and the engineering team was consuming a library that required translation on every handoff. I led an audit and overhaul spanning hundreds of components, which meant triage first: identify what could be consolidated versus what needed a rebuild, prioritize based on component frequency across the product, and sequence the work so it shipped in parallel with feature development rather than blocking it. The result was a system that let a three-person design team support dozens of engineers without every handoff becoming a negotiation.

The third job was harder to name: acquisition readiness. The CEO and Director of Product were thinking about where the product needed to be to attract a buyer at the right valuation. That shaped the roadmap conversation. Design's role wasn't just shipping features. It was helping the product tell a coherent story about what it was and where it was going. That meant visual coherence, interaction consistency, and a platform that a team at Yahoo Finance could look at and see potential rather than technical debt.