I design with people, for people.

I came into UX in the early days of the web, working at two local design firms before going independent for five years. I joined Cynergy in 2010 to lead UX in small teams on enterprise projects for Fortune 500 clients in finance, logistics, and technology.

When KPMG acquired Cynergy in 2014, I came along with it, and what I expected to be a transition turned into more than a decade leading UX on engagements inside the consulting side of a Big Four firm.

What I’m most proud of, across all of this, is the careers of the designers I’ve coached. I served as a Performance Management Leader there, formally responsible for the growth and advocacy of no more than two designers at a time. Small enough to actually know them, and to do the harder work of telling someone honestly where they needed to develop and then helping them get there. Separately, I served as the Craft Advisor to a Craft Cohort of six to eight designers, part of an effort to build and sustain genuine design craft inside the architecture of a Big Four firm. Those of us who came over from Cynergy in the 2014 acquisition came up as a craft-led agency, and the Craft Cohort was one of the ways that thread carried forward. The cohort named themselves Design S. Pumpkins by vote, after the immersive Halloween haunt that’s been my longest-running user research project, eighteen Octobers in and counting.

I came up through design and front-end development, and I never wanted to stop making things. Twenty years on, I still open Figma every week. The “designer at heart” line on the home page is how I keep the leadership work honest. I can’t ask a designer on my team to push back on the SI or hold a position on an AI assistant interaction if I haven’t done the equivalent work recently enough to know what I’m asking. Staying in the craft is what lets me be useful in the room when the work gets hard.

The other thing twenty years has taught me is that the hardest UX work at this scale happens upstream of the product. It happens in the rooms where the decisions get made, with engineering, product owners, and the third-party teams on the build side. Getting design into those rooms is what I’ve gotten good at. So is making sure the work that comes out is the kind users actually want to use.

Most recently I led UX teams at KPMG. Open to conversations about what’s next.

I’m based in the DC/Baltimore metro area and work remotely with teams anywhere. You can reach me at hays@noestudios.com, or find me on LinkedIn.