Every product people rely on is a stack of decisions. Most teams split that stack across five roles. Here is what sits inside it.
01 / 05 — Layer
Understand the problem
Before any screen: who it is for, what job they need done, what the business needs to be true, and which constraints are real. The work starts with the right questions.
01
02 / 05 — Layer
Define the product
Turning what was learned into a plan — what matters first, how information is organized, and which few workflows carry the whole product.
02
03 / 05 — Layer
Shape the experience
Structure becomes something people can feel: wireframes, interaction, visual language and a design system that keeps it coherent as it grows.
03
04 / 05 — Layer
Build the real thing
Design that survives contact with reality — engineered, integrated with real data and services, and iterated in the actual medium, with AI as part of a modern workflow.
04
05 / 05 — Layer
Make it ready for people
Quality, launch readiness, brand and positioning — the layer that turns a working build into something people can find, trust and choose.
05
The whole stack
Five layers. One person who can hold all of them.
Not a replacement for a team — the connective tissue that keeps a product coherent from the first question to launch.
Real products where I owned the whole stack — from the first question to the market-facing site.
Pandough
A dough planning product that starts from the flour you actually have. I shaped the concept, designed the experience and the brand, built the working product, and made the market-facing website.
Problem
Dough tools assume ideal flour. Real bakers don't have it.
Hard part
Planning logic with real functional depth, kept approachable.
Scope
Concept to working product and its marketing site.
A pricing tool for listing agents. Asked to redesign one table, I designed and built the whole product, from map search to the shared report, then shipped it with the engineer who built v1.
Starting point
A brief to redesign one table, maybe as a clickable prototype.
Reframe
The whole pricing job: search, compare, market, report, share.
Scope
Product, UX, brand and build, then a handover to a pair.
Independent builds are half the story. At MetaRouter I worked within a product team on a complex enterprise platform — the kind of long-term product work where design systems, dense interfaces and collaboration matter more than any single screen.
Visual pending permission review.
01
Team collaboration
Working alongside engineering and product over many release cycles.
02
Design system
Building and maintaining the shared language the product is made from.
03
Complex interfaces
Making technical, data-heavy enterprise workflows usable.
04
Long-term ownership
Living with decisions, and improving them, over years — not sprints.
How I work
Judgment first. Tools second.
01
Start with the problem, not the screen
I'd rather spend a day on the right question than a week on the wrong interface.
02
Prototype in the real medium
Code is a design tool. The fastest way to know if something works is to build it.
03
Systems over one-offs
Brand, components and tokens are product infrastructure — they keep everything coherent as it grows.
04
AI as leverage, not a substitute
AI tools speed up the build. Ownership, taste and decisions stay human.
Contact
Let's build the product you need.
I'm looking for a full-time product role at a small or mid-sized US team in technology or an adjacent field.
