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Currently advising several companies. As a seasoned CEO and executive leader I act as the CXO to my clients. I provide coaching, strategic guidance and practical support to my client's C-suite.
I’ve written several books on leadership. Most recently, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams, which I co-authored with Nate Walkingshaw and Martin Eriksson. I also authored Design Leadership, a guide for leaders of both design teams and design agencies/firms. My first book, Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products, I co-authored with C.Todd Lombardo and Trace Wax. Each of these books has sold over 10,000 copies and have been translated into a dozen or more languages.
Previous to my advisory work I was VP of Design Transformation at InVision, a Saas platform for designers and developers. My team was responsible for building practices and products to accelerating design maturity with our enterprise clients. My portfolio of digital maturity-focused solutions included the Design Maturity Assessment, InVision Learn, and The Design Leadership Forum. These three pillars supported our customer's digital transformation goals. My team also produced documentary films on how successful teams work together, notably the movies 'Squads' and 'Transformation by Design'.
Before selling the company, I was CEO of Fresh Tilled Soil, a digital product design firm with over 700 client projects and voted Best Places to Work on several occasions. Our clients ranged from Fortune 500 and public companies like Intel, Microsoft, GE Healthcare, Walgreens and Time Warner Cable, to top brands like BWIN, Ritz-Carlton, NStar, Harvard University, MIT, Boston University, CSpace, Innosight.
Prior to Fresh Tilled Soil, I was a cofounder of Acceleration, now a WPP company.
My life has been a seriously colorful experience. Some of the highlights include being an officer in the South African Defense Force and working as a dive-master on the remote archipelago of the Islamic Republic of the Comoros. I've been fortunate enough to have been an investor in 21 startups. Some great, some not so much.