Design, operations, and the work in between.
I started drawing as a kid — sports stars mostly, whose autographs I collected at games — and that took me to the California College of the Arts to study illustration. After school I drifted out of making images and into operations work at Postmates and then Twitter, helping build and label the data sets that trained machine learning models.
On the side I taught myself what was then called user experience design, now product design, and for the last seven years I’ve been doing it full time, mostly for healthcare platforms. First at Collective Health, designing member tools, claims software, and billing workflows. Then at LifeStance, where I lead design for a national booking platform that runs across 33 states.
The metrics, and what lives behind them.
The work I’m proudest of is the work that shows up as a number on somebody’s P&L. Thirty seconds cut from an average call. Forty percent of manual billing work removed. A design-team ROI I could actually model out and defend to a new CTO.
But the other half of the job — the half I try not to be precious about — is sitting with the person on the other end of the workflow. A call-center agent who has to say the same three sentences 74 times a day. A claims adjuster looking at a form that was never designed for her. A patient in the middle of a mental health crisis navigating a booking flow at midnight. The metrics come from paying attention to them, not from optimizing around them.
I think a lot about what it means to design systems that have empathy built in — not as a decorative layer, but as part of the structural logic. I don’t always get it right. But it’s the compass.
The geography of it.
I grew up in Los Angeles, spent a decade in the Bay Area (Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco), two years in Manhattan, and the last few in Franklin, Tennessee — a Nashville suburb. In 2027, Chicago.
Each move changes the work a little. The design-ops instincts sharpened in San Francisco; the operations mindset came from Postmates and Twitter; the comfort with regulated, ambiguous systems came from working with clinicians in healthcare. Franklin taught me that the best collaboration is often asynchronous and unhurried. I’m curious what Chicago teaches me.
The outside of work.
I read about 50 books a year. I’m boxing again. I run a separate site — a reader’s atlas of the books that have stayed with me and the data that grew out of them. If you’ve read a book that changed how you see something, I’d love to hear about it.
I set aside an hour each week for other designers — portfolio reviews, career moves, untangling tricky work situations.
If that sounds useful, grab a spot. If you want to talk about hiring, email me.
— Cody