The practice.
I work with maybe eight teams a year, for engagements that last between three weeks and three months. The work is usually somewhere in the space between design, product, and strategy — closer to a careful reading of a situation than to a clean discipline. Most engagements are sized so that they end well: short, in writing, with the answer in.
I have been building digital products for over twenty years. On my own since 2014, with a studio I co-founded in Berlin in between, called Lemma, which is still there and still good, but which I left in 2021 to do quieter work, alone.
How the work tends to look.
An engagement usually begins with an email. A real one — not a form. A few honest sentences about what is happening. I write back within a few days, with an actual response, not a calendar link. From there, we have a thirty-minute conversation, free, on your situation. Often that is enough.
If the conversation suggests that more work would help, I write a brief. One page. Scope and cost named up front. You decide whether to continue. From there, the shape varies — sometimes a single workshop, sometimes weekly sessions for two months, sometimes a long quiet recurring conversation. Always with a clear ending.
I do not have a deck. I do not have a methodology. I have, instead, two decades of attention, a long shelf of books, six worksheets I run honestly, and a small set of practices I trust. Whether any of that is useful for what is in front of you is the kind of question best answered in thirty minutes.
What I do not do.
I do not lead teams. I do not do production work. I do not run an agency, take retainers longer than three months, or do anything that involves logos or naming. I do not run trainings, write courses, or build templates for sale. I do not have a podcast and never will. I do not, on the whole, do anything that asks me to be someone other than one careful person.
How I read.
A short shelf of books I return to, in case it is useful as a kind of compass to whether we would think well together. The list is honestly short — I am suspicious of long reading lists for the same reason I am suspicious of long meetings.
- A Pattern Language For the way it treats design as a moral act, not a stylistic one.
- The Reflective Practitioner The book about judgment I most often press into other people's hands.
- When I Was a Child I Read Books Reminds me what attention sounds like when it is taken seriously.
- Beautiful Evidence The case for clarity, from someone who lived it.
- Upstream For the patience of looking until you see.