# Chris Hays · UX Leader

> Portfolio of Chris Hays, an AI-enabled human-centered UX leader with 20+ years in the field. Focus on distributed team leadership, design systems, designing AI into workflows where it earns its place, and coaching designers into their next role. Currently between roles, open to conversations about what's next. DC/Baltimore metro, remote-friendly.

## Pages

- [Home](/): Landing page covering four principles (UX leader, designer at heart, human-centered, research-driven), featured work, core skills, and short About and How I Lead teasers.
- [Work](/work/): Long-form case studies from 20+ years leading UX. They cover taking over UX delivery mid-stream on a Microsoft Dynamics transformation for a Fortune 50 medtech company, leading the field research behind a major US city's criminal justice modernization, designing the UX architecture for the HUD Loan Review System used by the Federal Housing Administration and its lenders, and designing a conversational voice agent that members of a large health plan call to find in-network care, built on IBM Watson.
- [How I Lead](/how-i-lead/): Four leadership principles with supporting feedback from direct reports, peers, managers, and project directors. Staying calm under shifting conditions. Translating complex work into something stakeholders can act on. Building the designers I work with through PML coaching and Craft Cohort facilitation. Advocating for the people I lead.
- [About](/about/): Background from early-web UX through two design firms, five years independent, and more than a decade leading teams solving new problems. Emphasis on coaching designers (PML and Craft Advisor work) and the lesson that the hardest UX work at this scale happens upstream of the product. Contact information.

## Writing

- [Research in the dark](/writing/research-in-the-dark/): A personal essay. For eighteen years I've built a Halloween haunt in the dark. It runs on the same instincts as the work I do building products.