Austin is an experience design leader and product design specialist.
I am a hands-on product design leader, mentor, and designer of high-quality digital products and experiences in FinTech, Web3, AI, e-commerce, and emerging technologies. The products I have designed meet the highest standards while delivering meaningful experiences to their customers.
Over the length of my career in design, I've worked with multi-disciplined design teams of varying sizes, interviewed thousands of designers, and studied how design operates and matures within companies worldwide. During this time, I've noticed the need for more education supporting design storytelling, nurturing individual growth, and modern design recruitment.
My role as a leader, mentor, and designer is to balance thoughtful guidance with diverse levels of empowerment to support individual decision-making. Working with me means working transparently and inclusively, sharing in-progress work early and often, and framing problems as opportunities within yet-to-be-understood contexts. I prioritise collaboration over independence. The best way to deliver meaningful outcomes is through shared responsibilities.
As a leader, I focus on achieving unique ideas through proactive action and creating authentic relationships that encourage deliberate, measurable outcomes.
If a team I'm working with fails, I don't see such situations as finite or defining. Instead, I see failure as a chance to learn something and adapt to what we achieve next.
I strive to build a respectful yet playful culture built on the concept of strong views, loosely held to challenge our thinking and praise curious questions about how something fits into the big picture. Support comes from helping connect ideas, projects, and individuals or providing nudges on varied or alternative outcomes. I align myself with company values by routinely using them as tie-breakers or evaluation methods.
My strengths are primarily in having and encouraging a growth mindset based on self-awareness, creating a work-life balance where ideas can incubate and thrive, encouraging creative thinking, and acting authentically in everything I do. These strengths are mine and what I work to incorporate into my teams. Through this, I hold my team to high standards while supporting them ruthlessly to achieve success.
I've championed the coexistence of product, design, and engineering throughout my career, using agile processes and lean UX methodologies. Through partnerships with executive-level stakeholders, I have helped mature design within companies and deliver value in unlocking innovation through design.