01 Work

Three decisions, and what they cost.

Each is a call I made, the tradeoff it carried, and what happened next, including the parts I'd do differently. Some are design-led and some are systems-led. In practice they were the same work.

  1. Rebuilding VyprVPN so it just works VyprVPN's apps had aged: feature accretion, confusing onboarding, and shaky connections had pulled the store rating to 3.2. We refreshed the brand and rebuilt all four native apps around one expectation, that a VPN has to just work, and the rating climbed to 4.7. Native apps · UX · Onboarding · Consumer SaaS · Retention Golden Frog, GmbH 2015–2022
  2. Rebuilding the buying experience for a six-figure purchase Rebuilding precious-metals e-commerce end to end: a faster storefront, a clearer buying experience, and an integration layer so the price and inventory on the page are the ones we can honor. E-commerce · UX · Conversion · Performance · ERP integration United States Gold Bureau 2023–present
  3. Taking an engineering org AI-first, in stages Cycle time halved and substantive pull requests per contributor tripled. Over more than a year I moved the United States Gold Bureau's engineering org onto an AI-first model in stages: early Codex, then a Cursor and Claude Code mandate as the models got good, a shared knowledge base in Notion, and a move off Jira to Linear. Engineering leadership · AI adoption · Developer tooling · Delivery · Knowledge management United States Gold Bureau 2025–present