Your portfolio is not the presentation There is a specific kind of silence that happens in a portfolio interview. It is not dramatic. Nobody throws a chair. Nobody says, Tyler, this is becoming a crime scene. It is smaller than that. The hiring manager stops nodding. The PM looks at the slide thumbnails instead of the slide you are on. Someone leans back a little. One person is still smiling, but it has the same energy as a flight attendant during turbulence. The work might still be good. The...
7 days ago • 10 min read
Every tool should earn its seat A year and a half ago, I joined CapIntel. This week, I was promoted to Principal Product Designer. Which feels incredible. Not in the “I have ascended into corporate enlightenment” kind of way. More in the “holy shit, I’m trusted to solve bigger problems now” kind of way. And honestly, that trust has changed how I think about design. The more senior I get, the less I care about making beautiful static screens that sit in Figma collecting digital dust. I care...
14 days ago • 6 min read
You’re doing the work that should’ve been handed off I don’t think most designers are slow. I think we’ve just gotten weirdly good at staying busy with work that doesn’t need us. Not obviously wrong either. The kind that feels responsible and thorough, like you’re doing your job properly. That’s what makes it hard to spot. This hit me after a client call, somewhere between work, travel, and waiting for a flight home from a Toronto offsite. Laptop open at the airport, half a drink beside me,...
21 days ago • 5 min read
Why your portfolio always feels almost ready You open your portfolio and the first thing you do isn’t read the work. You zoom out. You look at the layout, the spacing, the balance of the page. Something feels off, but you can’t point to it. So you start moving things around. A little padding here. New grid there. Maybe swap a section. Maybe try a different template. You tell yourself you’re improving it. An hour goes by. It looks better. You still don’t want to send it to anyone. That’s the...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Figma Make slowed me down more than it helped Figma Make pissed me off this week. Like actually pissed me off. I was trying to build something real. Not a hero section. Not a fake UI. Real product shit. Upload, processing, validation, graph, review. Something with actual moving parts. And it felt wrong immediately. Not visually. Physically. Like dragging your hand across rough paper. That dry resistance. That slight catch on your skin. You feel it before you even think about it. Every...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Your kickoff is the problem Everyone can ship now. So why are we still building the wrong things? I had a conversation recently with someone who told me their team spent three weeks shipping something that should have taken a few days. No big surprises. No crazy scope. Just a straightforward feature. Three weeks. And I remember thinking… yeah, that sounds about right. Because I’ve seen that exact situation play out more times than I can count. It usually starts the same way. You get everyone...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
The plan I told myself this would take 30 minutes. Add authentication, hook up a welcome email, maybe set up a simple onboarding flow so when someone signs up they actually know what to do next. Nothing crazy, just enough to move the product forward. My kid was at daycare until 1. My wife was watching trash TV. I had a clean window and figured I’d knock this out before joining her on the couch like a civilized human. This is the kind of work that should be straightforward now, right? AI...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
This week I kept coming back to the same thought. “AI is helping us build faster.” Cool. But how much of what we’re building actually makes money? I saw a clip this week from Jonathan Courtney calling this out directly. Everyone is building. Shipping. Launching. But when you zoom out, a lot of it isn’t translating into real business impact. And I think I know why. We’ve collapsed the time it takes to build, but we haven’t improved the quality of the thinking behind it. So now we’re just...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
What the poll made obvious I ran a quick poll this week to see what you want more of. I had a guess. I was wrong. Here’s what came back. AI workflows in real product work: 60%Real product breakdowns: 40%Everything else: basically noise Small sample, but clear enough. Why this matters Most of the talk online about AI in design is still surface level. Tools. Prompts. Outputs. A lot of it is just noise, and honestly a bit of bullshit. What people actually want is how this shows up in real work....
2 months ago • 4 min read