About Brandon
Builder first.
I've spent 18+ years building products, leading teams, and designing systems that work for real people in real organizations.
From early-stage startups figuring out what to build, to scaling companies improving what they built, to enterprise organizations working through years of accumulated complexity, I've seen the full cycle.
User research. Product strategy. Design systems. Team development. The messy reality of shipping things that matter.
The common thread across all of it: I care about things that actually work. Not features for the sake of roadmap completeness. Not technology for the sake of appearing innovative. Useful tools that solve real problems for real people.
Building useful things requires understanding systems: how information flows, how decisions get made, and how teams coordinate under uncertainty.
Product work, at its core, is systems design. I tend to reduce complex things into flowcharts. If I cannot map the problem, I probably do not understand it yet.
That instinct has followed me from an engineering education at Northwestern University through consulting, product, design, research, strategy, and leadership roles over my career.
My current work is expanding that foundation across product, growth, data, engineering, operations, and AI.
I am building a professional operating system for how people and AI work together. The useful question is not which model sounds smartest. It is how context moves, how decisions persist, how quality improves, and how the system stays usable alongside real work and real life.
AI is a new technical material. The job is still familiar: understand the customer, find the real constraint, make a clear choice, build something useful, and learn from what happens next.
Build, do not speculate. Start simple. Use evidence. Give people room to lead. Keep fixing small things.
I value transparency, trust, respect, and ownership. I try to state what I know, what I do not know, and what I think we should do next. I move fast, sometimes too fast, so I am continually working on sharing context and bringing people along.
I have written the longer version as a Manager README. It explains how I think about one-on-ones, feedback, development, ownership, positive intent, systems, and service to the team.
Read my Manager README