👋 Hey there, I'm Max!

I work hard so my dog can have a better life

I started my career as a librarian, which is either a weird origin story for a product designer or a completely obvious one, depending on how you look at it. Librarians spend a lot of time thinking about how to organize information so people can actually find it, how to help someone who doesn't know the right terminology yet, and how to build systems that work for the person who uses them rather than the person who built them. Turns out that's most of what product design is too.

As a senior product designer with over a decade of experience I specialize in simplifying complexity — finding the patterns, naming the problems clearly, and creating the kind of shared understanding that gets teams and stakeholders aligned around the right work. The through line of my career has been pattern recognition across large, complex spaces — whether that's an information architecture problem, a fragmented multi-team product experience, or a design system that needs to scale. I'm drawn to the kind of problem where you have to zoom way out before you can figure out what you're actually solving.

Lately I've been investing heavily in my engineering skills, and particularly in working with design systems on both sides of the design-to-code handoff. That end-to-end thinking, where a naming decision at the token level ripples up into the component API, is exactly the kind of problem that just clicks for me. I'm particularly interested in roles where the boundary between design and code is something to explore rather than something to stay on one side of.

I'm based in Portland, OR, and when I'm not working you might find me lifting heavy weights at my local powerlifting gym, hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, reading three books at once, or just hanging out and taking long walks with my dog, Rufus.