Me in 10 minutes

I was in grade six when my father taught me AutoCAD so I'd stop being bored during a school vacation. He's a structural engineer. I drafted his blueprints, badly at first, then less badly. That was the first time I felt it: first there was nothing, then there was something, and I made the something. Everything since has been chasing that feeling.

I grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I studied marketing and human resources, which sounds unrelated until you notice my entire career has been about understanding what people want and building teams that deliver it. On the side, and then not on the side, I was a photographer. Getty Images carried my work. Photography taught me the thing design school never could have: you don't control the light, you work with it.

By 2008 I was leading a design studio at Spellbound, which was a Leo Burnett affiliate at the time. Those years gave me lessons America couldn't have. I made real mistakes with people early, and I got to spend years rebuilding those bridges with the same people, in the same city, because there was nowhere to hide. That changed my temperament permanently. I also worked under leaders there whose transparency and integrity I've been imitating ever since.

In 2011 I followed my wife to New York and started over. New country, no network, a portfolio nobody asked for. JPMorgan Chase hired me to modernize legacy internal software, which is the least glamorous and most honest form of design work: nobody praises you, but four thousand people's workday gets better.

Then came the craft years in Washington DC. Client work at Streetsense, part of CBRE. Then Binary Fountain, where I led product design for healthcare analytics used by major US health systems, and where I learned that leading designers is a different craft from design, and that I loved it more.

Oracle made me a principal designer and handed me cloud infrastructure. Capital One made me a leader of leaders and handed me a portfolio: partnerships design across consumer and business experiences for some of the largest retail brands in America. That's where design stopped being what my teams produced and became how the business decided.

Now I lead Product Experience at Epicor, working at the intersection of product, design, engineering, and AI. The job is rebuilding a design organization for the AI era, which I think is the most interesting problem in the industry right now. Not adding AI to design. Rebuilding what a design organization is for.

Some honest miscellany. I'm organized, and the people who've worked with me would say it before I could. I've learned there are forms of leadership I'm naturally good at and others I'm not. I'm strongest when a problem needs structure, judgment, and a point of view. I'm less useful when the answer is another workshop. I read modern philosophy lately, Chomsky and Alan Watts, the latter thanks to Mike, my former manager at Capital One, who knew what I needed before I did. I binge television with the commitment of a professional, Friends through Peaky Blinders through Ted Lasso. I play strategy games like Cities: Skylines, and my wife would tell you it's because I can't stop making systems connect, even on vacation. She'd be right.

I'm a husband and a father. That's the real job. The rest of this page is what I do between school runs.

Ten years from now, the win isn't a title. It's a healthy set of faces: people I worked with, who were successful with me, who grew because we grew together. That's the portfolio I'm actually building.