Director of UX Design · Riot Games · VALORANT
I am a long-time gamer. From waking up on Christmas to unwrap our first Nintendo with my little brother, to Unreal Tournament LAN parties in college, to years of raiding in WoW and FFXIV. Of course, I'm still playing any number of games almost every day. That's not incidental to how I think about design; it's where my empathy for players comes from.
With over twenty years in design and over a decade at AAA game studios, I've spent the last five at Riot building the organization, teams, and UX strategy behind how players experience VALORANT - from the heat of a clutch to the systems they navigate every day.
Good UX leadership isn't about taste. It's about clarity of purpose, building conditions for great work, and on VALORANT, holding the tension between player needs and competitive depth.
Strategy Before Solutions
Before any screen gets designed, I work to make sure the team understands why it matters: what player value it creates, how it connects to the broader experience, and what tradeoffs it asks us to make. Great execution on the wrong problem is still the wrong problem.
Player-Informed, Not Just Designer-Driven
Intuition is a starting point, not a final answer. I build teams that stay dialed in to how players actually experience the game, through research, playtests, telemetry, and community sentiment, and use that to pressure-test assumptions before they ship.
Name the Tradeoffs
The best design decisions are ones where everyone understands what they're gaining and what they're giving up. I'd rather have friction in discovery, or a real conversation in design review, than alignment that's never been pressure-tested. Design always involves tradeoffs - our job is to make them visible.
Build the Org, Not Just the Work
My job is to make the team better: through critique culture, clear frameworks, cross-functional trust, and leadership development. The work I'm most proud of isn't a single feature; it's a team that raises its own bar.
2021 – Present
Riot Games
ActiveDirector, UX Design, VALORANT
Over five years at Riot, progressing from Senior UX Manager to Director, owning the end-to-end UX strategy across VALORANT's multi-platform ecosystem. Built and scaled the UX discipline through a critical growth phase: establishing leadership depth, experience principles, quality standards, and cross-functional frameworks that let the team operate with clarity at scale. Beyond VALORANT, contributing to company-level discipline work including hiring processes, craft competencies, and design leadership standards across the organization.
Focus: Strategy · Org Leadership · Multi-Platform
2015 – 2021
Blizzard Entertainment
Design Lead, Senior II
Progressed from UX/UI Designer on Overwatch League and Heroes of the Storm to senior design leadership across Battle.net and Online Products. Founded the Design Operations function, built a cross-platform design system, and directed a centralized Design Studio. Previously led UX for esports platform tools supporting global competitive ecosystems.
Focus: Design Ops · Systems · Esports
Pre-2015
Various Agency & In-House
10+ Years in Design
Broad foundation across design leadership, branding, ecommerce, and web design, including guest lecturing at UCI and alumni mentorship through SCAD.
Focus: Branding · Web · Education
As a director, my work doesn't show up in screenshots. It shows up in the quality, coherence, and resilience of a team and its output over time.
Grew and structured the UX team through a critical expansion phase: building management depth, establishing critique rituals, and creating frameworks that let designers work with more clarity and less escalation.
Focus: leadership pipeline, operational maturity, team health
Developed a cohesive UX strategy spanning VALORANT's full player ecosystem, connecting in-match clarity, meta-system engagement, and player identity into a single, operable framework for the design org.
Focus: pillars, values, design principles, cross-team alignment
Led UX for VALORANT's expansion to console, ensuring that a PC-native, high-precision experience translated to controller-first interaction without degrading the tactical depth that defines the game.
Focus: interaction model, platform parity, design systems
Repositioned UX from a downstream delivery function to an upstream strategic partner: influencing roadmap, shaping problem framing, and building the cross-discipline trust needed to make that stick.
Focus: product influence, design advocacy, decision frameworks
Leading exploration of how AI can support UX at scale, from research synthesis to design exploration, in the context of a live service game. Building toward practical, team-wide fluency rather than individual tool adoption.
Focus: workflow innovation, team capability, responsible integration
Designed and lead a recurring multi-day leadership onsite for VALORANT's UX managers, creating dedicated space to step out of daily execution and focus on org-wide priorities, staffing, and shared ownership of design quality. Intentional investment in leadership growth ensures talent pipeline and succession planning is considered as the team grows and matures, a skill I've coached other leaders on across Riot.
Focus: leadership ritual, org alignment, cross-team coaching