Approach
The same three moves, on every project.
Most hard problems start as a wall of legal, regulatory, or technical constraints nobody wants to touch. My job is turning that into a decision people can act on, then holding that decision through legal review, stakeholder pushback, and every revision after. Same three moves, regardless of industry.
The Process
01
Audit
Read what's already live and flag what's unclear, redundant, or failing an accessibility check before building anything new. At Agile Defense, this is the first phase of Discovery: sitting with federal stakeholders before prototyping anything, every time a new engagement starts.
02
Draft
Build the first real version, a prototype, a plan, a decision, before folding back in the legal, brand, or technical requirements. At Agile Defense, that's the concept-prototype stage of Discovery: a working dashboard built to react to, before anyone commits to the final build.
03
Ship
Test it with the people who'll actually push back, legal, dev, a real user, and hold the line through revisions. That discipline is what turned a 5,000-plus page university site with 20-plus navigation menus into one with 35% more engagement.
What Stays Constant
Clarity over cleverness
I'll take the boring answer that's right over the clever one that needs a follow-up meeting to explain, every time. The job is deciding what's actually true, then keeping the version that survives someone asking a hard question about it.
Prove it before you promise it
Federal agencies don't sign on a pitch deck. At Agile Defense, I help build working concept prototypes, real dashboards, real data, before the contract exists, because a demo earns trust a proposal can't.
Repeatable over one-off
A style guide nobody opens isn't a system. The standards, audits, and intake frameworks I build get adopted and reused, because a fix that only works once isn't really a fix.
The last 25% is the job
My mentor Russ Unger calls it the 75% trap: AI gets you most of the way fast, and that's exactly when it's tempting to call it done. The real work, and where trust gets earned or lost, is the iteration after that. I budget for it every time.