Good morning, I'm Mack

Design is a thinking problem dressed up as a visual one.

Lead product designer with a track record of building products, teams, and the systems that make both work at scale. Currently at Soundstripe. Previously Creative Director at Riff Creative.

Product Design Design Leadership Design Systems UX Strategy Shipping with AI Design Ops Interaction Design

Surprise! Mentorship

Selected Work

01 Internal Tooling · Ops Platform

20 Years of Workarounds

Replacing a legacy desktop database with a real-time operations platform — and eliminating the rituals the team had built their entire workflow around.

UX Strategy Information Architecture System Design Billing UX

Read case study

02 Consumer SaaS · Music Licensing

Search That Speaks Music

Designing an AI-powered search experience that turned vague creative instincts into the right track — and increased download rates by 6×.

AI/ML UX Search & Discovery Metadata Systems Conversion

Read case study

03 Design Leadership · Agency

Seeing the Agency Before It Existed

An architecture firm had the relationships. I had the vision. Four years later, Riff Creative was a full-service studio with 15+ people and low seven figures in revenue.

Design Leadership Team Building Design Ops Creative Direction

Read case study

How I work

Opinions I'll defend in a room

Stances I've learned from being wrong first.

Durable designers are thinkers first.

Taste can be mimicked. Craft can be automated. What can't be replicated is the ability to frame the right problem, ask the question nobody asked, and stay a student no matter how senior you get.

Good design isn't subjective—it's just hard to articulate.

Taste isn't magic. It's pattern recognition built from exposure, experience, and a willingness to be wrong. When someone says "it's subjective," what they usually mean is "I don't have the language yet." My job is to close that gap—with the work, and with the words to explain it.

The brief is a design problem too.

The most expensive design work is work done in the wrong direction. Before I push pixels I push back on the problem—is this the right thing to build? For whom? Toward what outcome? Designers who only solve the problem as handed to them are leaving their most valuable contribution on the table.

The enemy of creative work isn't lack of talent—it's friction.

Bad briefs, too many opinions, unclear ownership—these kill good work long before it reaches the designer. The best creative leaders aren't producers—they're reducers. Remove the noise, protect the focus, and the work takes care of itself.

Designing in public is a leadership skill.

Sharing work before it's ready, narrating your thinking out loud, inviting friction early—this is what separates designers who influence organizations from designers who execute in a corner. The ability to make your process legible to non-designers is one of the most undervalued skills in the field.

The best design leaders are force multipliers, not bottlenecks.

Your job isn't to be the best designer in the room—it's to make the room better. When the quality of the work doesn't depend on you being in every meeting, that's not a sign you're not needed. That's the whole point.