The Exact Shape of an Engagement
Clear expectations & practical work.
Most design relationships fail when you discover the real shape of the work by accident. It's usually mid-meeting, while wondering why this suddenly feels like design therapy, or a very expensive critique that never seems to end. That’s not me. I have little patience for ivory-tower design approaches that get teams in trouble for “taking too long,” and a strong bias toward practicality, traction, and forward motion.
That’s nice, Tara, but what do you actually do?
Scan the sections below to get a clear sense of what I do and don’t touch, how I work with your team in practice, and what I deliberately leave behind once you no longer need me.
What I Work On
Teams usually come to me with a vague sense that their UI needs to “be better.” That may or may not be true. What is almost always true is that UI quality is a downstream effect of how well a team handles a much smaller set of foundational problems.
Specifically:
Clarifying how the product is supposed to work
Untangling overlapping flows, one-off decisions, and legacy patterns.
Making the interaction model explicit so people stop guessing.
Stabilizing design decisions
Creating shared standards for components, patterns, and behaviors.
Reducing the need to re-litigate the same questions sprint after sprint.
Design infrastructure
Concrete systems: components, variants, naming, usage rules.
Documentation that engineers and future designers can actually use.
Sense-making in messy environments
Separating signal from opinion when feedback is loud and contradictory.
Translating “this feels off” into actionable design direction.
Pre-hire preparation
Doing the foundational work a full-time designer would otherwise inherit.
Preventing your first hire from starting their job already behind.
These are the things I work on. Your company may only need a subset of them—but even tackling one of these deeply can unlock disproportionate value for both your team and your users.
And Here’s What I Don’t Work On
I don’t own the product roadmap.
That responsibility stays with product leadership. I’ll engage in strategic thinking, pressure-test assumptions, and offer design input, but I don’t override your team’s decision-making. Design informs product. It doesn’t replace it.
I don’t build screens.
You have far cheaper and more scalable ways to get screens made: junior designers, contractors, AI-assisted tools, or established frameworks like Material Design. Paying me to push pixels would be an inefficient use of your budget, and a misuse of why I’m there.
I don’t stay forever.
The goal is replacement. Specifically, replacing me with a full-time design leader who walks into an organization that’s been set up to support them. I’ll stay as long as I’m useful, we’ll make real progress together, and when the time is right, I’ll step out.
How I Interact With Your Team
Let's get explicit about logistics. All engagements are remote. We work over Zoom, inside your existing tools. How embedded I am depends on the engagement you choose.
There are two ways we can work together, reflected in the two packages I offer:
Package 1
This is intentionally light-touch. It’s designed for teams who need senior design judgment, on an ongoing basis, just not daily. It’s often a good fit for seed-stage companies.
Two scheduled Zoom calls per month.
You bring real screens, flows, or questions.
I review, critique, and help you reason through design decisions.
No day-to-day Slack presence.
No execution work between calls unless explicitly agreed.
Don’t let “light-touch” mislead you. We get solid work done in those calls. Teams typically leave with clear direction and enough confidence to move forward for a few weeks before we regroup.
Package 2
Designed for teams who need active design leadership now, but aren’t yet ready to make a full-time hire. This is most often the case for Series A companies navigating scale.
Standing weekly Zoom sessions, with additional meetings as needed.
Ongoing async communication inside your existing tools.
Direct collaboration with product and engineering.
Active involvement in the design system.
In this package, I’m part of the day-to-day conversation. I help untangle decisions as they arise, reduce rework, and create enough structure that the system can hold as the team grows.
What I Leave Behind
Simply put, I leave behind a handoff.
Every engagement includes a Design Intelligence Handoff Package. This is a practical, working record of what we did and why we did it.
It typically includes:
Recorded working sessions.
Transcripts of those sessions.
Key design decisions and their rationale.
Design system artifacts, patterns, and documentation produced during the engagement.
Clear guidance on how to load this material into an AI system so future team members can interrogate past decisions instead of guessing.
In parallel, I help you prepare for my replacement:
Clarifying what kind of design leader you actually need next.
Shaping the job description and expectations.
Participating in interview loops if useful.
The outcome is a product that can scale, a team that understands its design decisions, and a new design leader who can step in without starting from zero.
Your Next Step
If this sounds like the kind of design relationship you’re looking for, the next step is a short introductory call. We’ll look at your current situation, see whether this is a fit, and decide together whether it makes sense to move forward.