Discovery, reframed as the foundation of every decision.

Discovery connects business objectives with real user needs.

Discovery is how I find out what the organization thinks the problem is, what users think the problem is, and where those two things differ. That gap is usually where the most important design work lives.

I use a mix of stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, competitive review, and synthesis workshops. The output isn't just insight documents. It's a team that's seen the evidence and agreed on what it means, so the design decisions that follow have something real under them.

The work I bring to discovery.

• Stakeholder interviews: One-on-one conversations with key internal partners to gather insights about user needs, business goals, internal challenges, and long-term vision.
• Journey mapping: Visual representations of the end-to-end user experience that identify pain points, gaps, and moments of opportunity informing future-state design.
• Empathy mapping: Collaborative workshops or research outputs that capture what users think, feel, say, and do, building team-wide understanding of user mindsets.
• Current-state experience analysis: Evaluation of existing platforms, workflows, or services to surface usability issues, content gaps, and misaligned expectations.
• Design thinking workshops: Facilitated sessions that bring cross-functional teams together to map challenges, generate ideas, and co-create alignment.
• Contextual inquiry & observational research: Real-world observation of users in their natural environments to capture unspoken behaviors, workarounds, and decision-making.
• Research synthesis & insight framing: Clear, actionable summaries distilled into themes that guide strategy, roadmap planning, and concept development.

Discovery shines at the start, or anytime alignment breaks down.

• Launching a new product or service with unclear user assumptions
• Inheriting a complex platform that's lost its compass
• Aligning leadership across product, design, engineering, and marketing
• Validating roadmap priorities against actual user behavior

Discovery in practice.

I've led discovery efforts across automotive, B2B commercial, and healthcare engagements, including Nissan Commercial Vehicles (dealership field studies), NissanUSA.com (mobile shopper behavior research), and Infiniti VRS (heuristic review and competitive benchmarking).