Three threads through the work
Not a tour. Nothing here needs reading in order and no thread depends on another — each one just groups work that makes a single argument, with a note on why each piece belongs to it. Threads have their own pages if one of them is the only part you want to send someone.
If you only read one thingHarmony. Harmony was intended to carry design intent to designers, engineers and AI coding agents.It closes the design-systems thread below, and working backwards from it is a perfectly good way in.
Design systems, three times
Three systems, three organizations. Each one corrected something the previous attempt got wrong, which is easier to see laid end to end than inside any one of them. Fulcrum unified the design team and stopped at engineering’s edge. Uplift got further only because the real fix was organizational — its engineers reported into Development, and moving them under UX had to come before any component work did. Harmony was intended to carry design intent to designers, engineers and AI coding agents. The arc is the argument.
The first attempt, and the one that stopped at the design team’s edge: a unified Figma library and a documentation site that engineering never picked up. What that gap cost is the argument the next two systems were built to answer.
BetterCloudHow a shared design language sped up prototyping by an estimated 40%, and what it revealed about cross-functional adoption.
How I led the design of Fulcrum, BetterCloud’s internal design system, unifying a fragmented SaaSOps product suite and learning firsthand what it takes to carry a design system across the boundary from design into engineering.
The second attempt, where the fix turned out to be organizational: the system was failing because its engineers reported into Development, so protecting their maintenance capacity became central to the work.
TVH Parts Co.How moving design system engineers under UX ownership, then co-designing governance with an engineering advocate, turned a neglected component library into shared infrastructure across four brand tech teams.
At TVH, a design system existed in name only. Engineers had stopped trusting it and were building their own components. Moving DS engineers under UX and co-designing governance with an engineering advocate stabilized the system and expanded it to four brand tech teams and 15 front-end developers, with a token architecture that would underpin the company’s planned international brand consolidation.
The third attempt. Harmony was intended to carry design intent to designers, engineers and AI coding agents.
Arcos, IncHarmony was intended to carry design intent to designers, engineers and AI coding agents. Building two prior systems shaped the architecture.
Harmony was intended to carry design intent to designers, engineers and AI coding agents. The story draws on what three companies of building design systems taught me about the architecture.
Research that reframed the product
One case study, not a series. Two and a half months embedded across 14 utility sites produced a product direction rather than a features backlog, and then two rounds of scope cuts tested how much of that direction survived contact with a ship date. It’s the only thread here at this depth, and the honest reason is that there isn’t a second one. Padding it would read worse than the asymmetry does.
The research method: a kickoff blueprint that reframed the product direction, then embedded fieldwork across 14 sites that sharpened its personas and blueprints, rather than a features backlog.
Arcos, IncHow a service blueprint from the kickoff turned a planned UI refresh into a platform built around the storm, what it took to ship that through two rounds of scope cuts, and what 2.5 months of fieldwork across 14 utility sites added afterward.
I joined Arcos at the kickoff for its emergency preparedness platform, now Arcos Control Tower for the back office and Arcos Field for mobile, when the plan was a modern UI. With a Slalom consultant I built the service blueprint, and from my first months of evidence I recommended a workflow-native platform instead. I developed the “user lenses” vision, prototyped it, and held it through two rounds of scope cuts to the first release in August 2025, which launched convoy tracking on the desktop and in Arcos Field together. Afterward I led 2.5 months of fieldwork across 14 AEP sites in six operating companies, which sharpened the personas and blueprints.
AI-assisted delivery, and what it changed
I rebuilt the handoff around design intent that could reach code, with designers validating generated specs and engineering reviewing the build. The merged Org Strategy study follows the recovered capacity upstream into product shaping. This site turns that approach toward two readers, a person checking the work and an agent reading the same facts, with a review gate before an application goes out. The public template below contains only the agent layer, not the whole site or application pipeline.
The delivery model in full: two MCPs in one context window, a spec that got generated rather than written, and the stakeholder group that was still only partially convinced when Jason left.
Arcos, IncHow restructuring the design-to-dev pipeline at Arcos cut kickoff time from two weeks to three days: one shared design language for UX, engineering, and AI.
At Arcos, design specs were thorough but not executable. Developers made hundreds of small judgment calls per feature, and AI entering the pipeline automated the ambiguity instead of solving it. I led Harmony’s architecture and contributed hands-on at Arcos, including work with a senior designer on the token architecture. Other contributors owned or completed parts of the component and implementation work. Harmony was intended to carry design intent to designers, engineers and AI coding agents. The context-rich npm package was paired with Storybook and Zeplin MCPs. Across three piloted Arcos Control Tower cycles, kickoff compressed from two weeks to three days, and the crew-entry Timecards prototype I built after field testing took about 12 hours against an estimated ~40 for a wired Figma prototype.
What the pipeline revealed once it was running: the recovered time moved design upstream, and the ways-of-working documentation my team published became the training set for another pod’s agent.
Arcos, IncArcos had no UX function before I arrived. Credibility, a team that owned its domains, and a delivery model that freed time for shaping are what made design a necessary voice in what gets built, not just how it looks.
Arcos had tried to build a Timesheet capability once before UX existed, and it missed. The second attempt was shaped with aggregated user data and a coded prototype tested with roughly 400 field users before engineering committed, and it shipped in beta in June 2026, reaching production in September 2026 after I left. Along the way I built a team of three Senior Designers who owned their domains, and a delivery model that recovered half a sprint to a full sprint per cycle. The recovered time showed where design’s real work was: upstream, in purpose and the shape of the data.
- Artifact
agent-layer-template
qaContext, llms.txt generation, and the eval harness this site’s own agent layer runs — extracted and published as a GitHub template repo, so it’s a thing you can fork rather than a paragraph you have to take on faith.
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