I care a lot about empowering people with technology.
I've spent 25 years at the intersection of design and engineering. I currently direct the Accessibility and Design Systems teams for New York State, where I'm exploring how design systems can serve as AI infrastructure. I also write about bridging design and engineering at Practical Design Systems.
Hiring Jesse was investing in the growth of our systems and culture. He has a unique eye that can pull everything together from what would engage users, how design impacts the UX, and how engineering can create systems even around the most complex design decisions. That's true design and strategic systems thinking.
I appreciated Jesse's balance of hands-on doing and client coaching and empowerment. He brought tools and templates from prior experience, but right-sized them for our particular context, then helped implement it so that it became part of our core process. We got exactly what we needed to be unblocked, in a way that felt easy to maintain over time.
Speed and quality, rigor and experimentation, intentionality and flexibility can co-exist when working with someone who understands the technical and design side as well as the business and human side. Jesse was on our side and truly cared. He was a wonderful collaborator.
Jesse seeks clarity so that he can provide clarity. He looks for answers. Not everybody is like that. People feel shy, like if they ask a question, someone might think badly of them. Jesse isn't like that.
Jesse is a good problem solver and a good collaborator. Not only does he come up with creative ways to solve design problems, he welcomes input from others to come to the best solution. He puts results over ego.
We were very happy we hired Jesse because of the care he put into our project, his patience with explaining things and working with our legacy systems, and because he's just generally a kind and reasonable person as well as being a skilled one.
Jesse was great and very easy to get along with — but I also felt like he was personally engaged with the project. It wasn't just a job, it was something that he wanted to do well, that he'd be proud of, and that I'd be happy with. And I was right.
Jesse takes complicated problems and makes them easy to understand, which helped our team make good decisions. He helped our product work better in the future by mapping out a costs-to-benefits comparison that help us make better decisions going forward.
Jesse is incredibly good at explaining things, and at conveying the real nuances and complexities of his work at the large organizations he's been at. He brings an attentive care, thoughtfulness, and thirst for knowledge that is incredibly stimulating. It's impossible to fake the passion he has for his work.
He is a very genuine human and loves giving back to his UX community. I found his UX journey extremely insightful, and he was able to articulate the parallels with my own journey. Jesse is also very well-spoken and he has a very calm demeanor, which is something that is very needed in our mentorship community.
Jesse is incredibly constructive and collaborative. Our conversations often turn to brainstorming approaches to problems I face in creating new products/services — his breadth of experiences has enabled me to rapidly question my assumptions and improve my approach.
Meeting with Jesse was insightful and really inspirational. He has helped us kick our design system project up a gear, and I am looking forward to having another session with him to discuss our progress.
His experience with design systems and accessibility helped me view my work from a different lens. He had a really clear approach to giving very well-articulated answers by asking the right questions and making sure that he knew the context to give the right feedback.
Jesse helped me to understand the business value and dev constraints are more important than building a design system for my portfolio's sake. He has great analogies to help me absorb the information instantly.