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Design Leadership

My experience spans brand design, creative direction, experience strategy. human-centered design and innovation, platform and design systems, data & artificial intelligence, and design leadership.

I'm passionate about empowering diversity, unleashing creativity, and improving ecology. And I see design as an infinitely scalable framework that can be applied to a business's biggest challenges and an employee's most acute opportunities. I've driven impact for large businesses and their customers - but also helped transform individual careers.

I’ve taught design to undergraduate and graduate students. I've mentored product professionals at every level, from interns and folks just breaking into the field to executives focused on scaling their impact and influence. I've led designers and non-designers at every level, across businesses and geographies. 

I actively develop and maintain relationships with students and faculty from design programs across the country and love adding new schools and emerging talent to my network - and my pipeline.

I mentor students and professionals around the globe through ADP and Mentor Collective.

I am inspired by humility, curiosity and bravery. I believe human-centered design, combined with critical/systems thinking, is the path to valuable products and service that change lives and communities.

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Leadership Experiences

Building a killer design team. Building a prototyping culture. Building awareness and appreciation for design. Connecting with and learning from our customers to solve their wickedest problems. Delivering design at scale for our AI-Driven Expert Platform. Shaping the brand that communicates our value to customers.

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Designing the Team to Design the Product & Marketing

I've spent 6 years recruiting, hiring, managing and retaining top talent. I did so by building a diverse pipeline, adopting a killer recruiting process and sweating the details to create a space and a culture where creativity thrives.

Making to Think, to Learn, to Tell a Story

I'm a huge believer that making prototypes is good for designers and non-designers. Making engages a more tangible part of your brain - and lends tangibility to the ideas we agree with in principle, but question the specifics. Prototypes drive behavior - and what people DO trumps what they say they'll do.

A site-wide celebration of Human Centered Design

In June 2015, I launched the first Design Week at Intuit, Plano. It has evolved into one of the most anticipated weeks of the year for our team - and always affords a variety of experts, experiences and opportunities to speak, make and learn.

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Platform Capability Design

Designing for re-use. Considering the Customer-facing experiences, the data we'll use to tailor them to our customers and the under-the-hood developer experience that makes them adoption-ready, off the shelf.

The Why, What and How of the Intuit Design System

The Intuit Design System's mission is to deliver data-guided Design & Code to accelerate and unify our AI-Driven expert platform.

Frameworks & Mindsets

Scaling design impact at Intuit through frameworks, experiments and talent development

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I've worked hard to develop a talent strategy that delivers resilience.

Three dynamics I lean into: Creating a magnetic culture, changing the trajectory of designers' careers, and being explicit with paths for succession, promotion and mobility.

Showtime Sync

This Emmy-nominated app paired Showtime's live and streaming content with second-screen polls, teasers and other interactive moments designed to heighten and extend the experience.

Helping Early Career designers find their calling, their voice and their feet.

If you would like to spend 30 min discussing your portfolio, your ambitions and your options, you can find me and schedule an appointment on https://www.adplist.org/ 

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What I'm writing about

I use Medium to write periodic observations on what I'm thinking about and what I'm doing about what I'm thinking about. Generally I focus on information I hope will be helpful to designers and aspiring designers. I've included links to some of my most read and shared articles here.

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Listen

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Jered O Show: Episode #007 with James Helms

Jered and I discuss design leadership, emotional design and making accounting interesting.

LIFTOFF: UX Outside the Box (w/ VP of Design at Intuit, James Helms)

Tony and I cover my role at SMU, Cafe Momentum as a case study for design thinking, how human centered design has lead to some of Intuit's biggest innovations, and more.

The Way of Product Design: 32 - James Helms, VP of Design @ Intuit - "Your co-workers are your portfolio"

Caden and I discuss my role at Intuit and lessons learned as I made the transition from individual contributor in agencies/consultancies to leadership for Intuit.

What is UX? S2E6 An interview with James Helms, VP of Design and Product, Intuit Platform

Pek and I discuss Intuit's business strategy, and the role that design and innovation has played in creating some of our most important and lucrative products.

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How can I help?

Talk to you soon!

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