Hi, I'm a product & design leader in San Francisco. I like making stuff for people.

About Dave

I am a hybrid of product manager and designer, with a strong engineering background—an alumnus of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, TechCrunch, and my own startup, Emu (acquired by Google in 2014).

My multi-disciplinary nature reflects a passion for synthesizing perspectives into a holistic vision; and an ability to pursue that vision pragmatically.

I enjoy beer, books, travel, monkeys, behavioral science, and just about any activity involving a body of water.

What's New

Jan 9 Is Your Design Portfolio Hurting You?

As a hiring manager, I’ve seen a lot of design portfolios. It’s obvious designers invest time in how they present their work—which makes it all the more tragic that most say very little to distinguish them. If you squint a little, 90% of design portfolios look the same.

Jun 15 Five Rants from a Cranky Designer

Don’t mistake the mockup for the product. Enough with the design systems, already. Stop asking users what they want. There’s a reason they call it “work.” Stop isolating yourself.

Jan 30 Your Users are Irrational

User errors are the bane of a developer’s existence. We’ve all experienced that strange blend of relief and rage when we realize a thorny issue is, in fact, user misunderstanding. But users aren’t clueless. They’re irrational — and we can use that to build better products.

Oct 9 Design is for everyone: 10 principles anyone can use

Every designer knows the frustration of uninformed feedback. An engineer says the design should have fewer clicks. An executive suggests it should “pop” more. A product manager insists it’s not “intuitive” enough: “I don’t think my grandma would understand this.” Non-designer feedback can be so uninformed, so off-base, so maddening…and yet so difficult to dissuade.

Apr 10 Chatbots: What Happened?

Remember chatbots, the Next Big Thing of 2016? According to Sam Lessin, “the 2016 bot paradigm shift is going to be far more disruptive and interesting than the last decade’s move from Web to mobile apps.” But that paradigm shift didn't materialize. What happened?

Nov 7 Designing for Intelligence: Embracing Inconsistency

If consistency is a goal, we must reject intelligence in software, since the very adaptiveness that makes it powerful also makes it unpredictable.
But consistency isn’t the goal.