436 Stafford St, Charlton, MA | (401) 855-2799 | [email protected] | LinkedIn

Principal Design Systems Leader & Architect

Principal Design Systems Leader with 20+ years of experience delivering measurable business value through strategic design systems. A hands-on architect and product designer who has led 4 enterprise systems, built 400+ components, and consistently accelerated development velocity by 24-30%. Expertise in driving adoption, establishing governance, and ensuring quality and consistency from 0-to-1 builds to mature, large-scale ecosystems.

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WORK EXPERIENCE

BlackLine

Los Angeles, CA (Remote) | Mar 2023 - Mar 2025

Leading cloud-based financial software company that automates accounting processes including financial close, consolidation, and accounts receivable for large enterprises and midsize businesses worldwide.

As Design Systems Lead & Product Manager

Directed the product vision and strategic roadmap for the Pantheon Design System, leading a 12-16 person UI Platform team while defining the operational frameworks and adoption strategies to scale its impact. This leadership role was part of a promotion where I simultaneously served as the hands-on Principal Product Designer and UX Architect.

• Revitalized a struggling design system by taking on a newly-created ‘Design System Lead’ role to define and execute a multi-year product vision, strategy, and roadmap. I took complete ownership of the end-to-end lifecycle, authoring 80% of requirements and establishing OKRs to drive organizational alignment. This strategic leadership doubled team velocity and component output, while new transparent roadmaps built organizational trust and reduced my time spent clarifying release schedules by 80%.
• Architected a robust operational framework from the ground up to eliminate chaotic workflows and introduce predictability. I instituted a new Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) that defined the entire product process, introducing new Agile/Scrum ceremonies like sprint planning and backlog grooming. This framework, centralized in new Jira and Confluence spaces, resulted in higher quality planning and design practices and streamlined the end-to-end development process, reducing implementation time by an estimated 20-30%.
• Pioneered a strategic "pilot program" that transformed the design system's adoption model from passive to proactive. I personally oversaw the system’s implementation across 40+ modernization projects, while embedding my team directly into 12+ of those to coach, train, and co-create features, establishing a successful federated contribution model. This partnership set a new standard for the organization, ensuring 100% adoption of the design system (both Figma and React) on all new initiatives, which accelerated product roadmaps and built organizational trust.
• Spearheaded a dedicated, quarter-long quality initiative to resolve over 1,000 critical, PDS-related bugs, clearing a path for future innovation. This focused effort successfully reduced the engineering capacity required for bug-fixing from 50% down to a sustainable ~15% in subsequent quarters. To achieve this, I implemented proactive daily PR reviews and championed a new automated visual regression testing process, which enhanced system stability and trust by minimizing rework and reducing downstream defects by an estimated 200-300%.