Executive Director, User Centered Design, UX Product Strategy & Applied AI

The Top Financial

Co-Founder (Product, Design & Technology)

I lead product, design and technology at The Top Financial, a life insurance and annuity business I co-founded. With my co-founder’s support, I took the platform from concept to production, and it has a patent pending covering 13 inventions.

Product ownership

I wrote the PRD and defined the phased plan, architecture, design direction and content. I commissioned an external penetration test on the platform against the OWASP Top 10 web security risks, and it found no issues.

Design system, built first

Design tokens and components speed up design, prototyping and implementation across the website, chat assistant and CRM.

Conversational AI assistant

Live in English and Portuguese, with guardrails, dynamic handling of out-of-scope questions, and a human-in-the-loop handoff to a licensed agent, only with the user’s permission.

CRM for licensed agents

One place to manage their customers and leads.

JPMorgan Chase

Executive Director, User Centered Design

Led User Centered Design for Trust & Security (Authentication): the sign-in, identity verification and authentication experiences behind JPMorgan Chase’s consumer digital products.

Product vision & execution

Defined and executed the experience vision that modernized the primary customer login, taking passkeys from concept through production rollout at consumer scale, with a sign-in experience that measurably outperforms passwords.

Strategic industry influence

Represented JPMorgan Chase in the FIDO Alliance UX Working Group. Took Chase’s requirements to the major platform vendors, making the case that authentication prompts should use fixed, context-driven text and iconography rather than generic copy. The platforms adopted it, shipped through a WebAuthn ticket rather than a years-long operating-system cycle: an industry-wide shift in how authentication prompts speak to the customer.

Balancing security & UX

Redesigned real-time fraud protection in money transfer experiences, sharply reducing friction for legitimate customers while strengthening protection against scams.

Scale & business impact

Led the expansion of secure digital demographic updates (e.g. phone changes) from call-center channels to self-service digital, giving customers a safer way to make sensitive account changes.

AI-native delivery

Guided adoption of the BMAD Method with GitHub Copilot (multi-LLM) across design, product, engineering and data analytics, structuring requirements definition and multi-role participation so AI-assisted projects begin with the context needed for production-quality outcomes, materially compressing the path from requirements to cross-functional alignment.

AI workflow transformation

Defined team-level AI practices that changed how the work gets done: designers exploring solution options through AI-generated early prototypes and wireframes, researchers accelerating consolidation and synthesis of findings. An evolving practice, and one that has increased the team’s efficiency across the design and research cycle.

Agentic strategy

Authored an executive point of view on agent identity and delegated authorization (how AI agents safely act on customers’ behalf), aligned with emerging FIDO, NIST, and payment-network direction.

Customer control & transparency

Defined the vision of the Security and Privacy Center, the surface where customers manage their third-party app access, giving customers visibility and control over who can reach their accounts.

Operational excellence & design operations

Established the User Centered Design process and validation framework, structured cross-functional design leadership forums, and centralized design operations dashboards that give leaders visibility into design work across the portfolio, enabling high-precision effort estimation, data-led resource allocation, and full transparency across design, product, and engineering.

Executive alignment & storytelling

Articulated complex product and experience visions through compelling visual storytelling, facilitating executive-level collaborative workshops to align cross-functional stakeholders on strategic design roadmaps.

Global team development

Led and mentored a 15-person design and research team, including leading international hiring initiatives and orchestrating multi-cohort ‘AI Design Strategies’ training to upskill the workforce in GenAI and agentic tooling. Championed inclusive design and accessibility (WCAG) across the portfolio.

Align Technology (Invisalign)

Director, User Centered Design

Built the product design team, process and design system from scratch at Invisalign, and transformed the digital experience for a global patient and doctor user base, winning multiple American Business Awards (Stevie®) including Gold in 2023.

Metric-driven results

Raised the mobile application rating from 2.8 to 4.8 stars within one year through a sustained program of UX improvements.

Registration optimization

Improved mobile registration success from 18% to 58% (+40 points), measured in production after a gradual rollout. Before engineering began, qualitative feedback loops validated the simplified flow with customers on ease of use and task completion.

Engagement growth

Roughly tripled product usage and photo-upload engagement by redesigning key customer interaction points.

Cross-platform strategy

Directed experience vision across multiple platforms, influencing product roadmaps to ensure a seamless end-to-end workflow from product to product.

Team and foundations

Grew and led a global design team, with design systems and a repeatable product design process as the foundation for scale.

McAfee & Intel

User Experience Design Director

Design organization

Led a team of 26 across interaction design, visual design, content, research and system analysis, including the design, content and research managers, their teams, and senior individual contributors. Set the bar for the work and made the calls that shaped the experience across the company’s consumer portfolio.

Early passwordless & biometric authentication

Led the experience design for True Key by Intel Security (a biometric, multi-factor identity product built on the principle “you are the password”), bringing facial recognition and trusted-device sign-in to consumers across platforms, a direct precursor to today’s passkey era.

Face authentication

Defined feature behavior for face authentication based on how customers perceived the technology, making a sophisticated solution feel human and natural. One patent filed for Intel out of this work.

Award-winning innovation

Led the design for McAfee LiveSafe, which won the PC Magazine Award for Best Product for six consecutive years, alongside multiple internal awards for UX leadership.

Concept to market

Conceptualized initial product visions that evolved into flagship consumer security products, including work featured in an Intel CEO CES keynote. Two began as early concept sketches and became among the top revenue generators for the Intel Security consumer group.

Cross-device ecosystem design

Directed consumer security experiences across web, mobile (iOS/Android), desktop (Mac and PC), wearables and IoT (more than 120 projects in a cross-regional agile environment), designing for the full device ecosystem during Intel’s push into connected security.

Global leadership through change

Built and led a worldwide team of product designers across a decade, including through the Intel acquisition and subsequent McAfee spin-out, sustaining a culture of creativity and delivery through two major corporate transitions.