How I Work

I grew up on a farm in Corning, Kansas. Population 212. I was valedictorian of a class of 27. Three years later I flunked out of Kansas State. It took four colleges and six years to get the degree.

I learn by building, breaking, and coming back.

On the farm, you fix what breaks because there’s no one else to call. I watched my dad do exactly that. It was the first thing I understood about work.

I taught myself to code. Started a streetwear brand. Worked across engineering, design, and product management. I kept reaching for the whole thing. For a long time, being a generalist felt like a failure to choose. I’m starting to understand it as the way I work best.

Virgil Abloh said young architects can change the world by not building buildings. That line stayed with me. I care less about what the work is called than whether I built it well.

I got married. I got baptized. I became a father. I sat down with someone and started telling the truth about myself.

I’ve dealt with anxiety since I was a teenager, and depression as I’ve gotten older. For a long time, I thought that meant something was wrong with me. Talking about it has helped me understand myself with a little more patience.

I say that here because it helped me to hear someone else say it first.

Being a parent has also made me pay closer attention to how I speak and listen. I’m learning how much I can miss when I think I already understand someone.

At CommunityAmerica, I work on banking experiences. People come to them with something they need to do: move money, open an account, understand a decision.

I want to understand what they expect and where we make things harder than they need to be. The way someone believes a thing should work matters. I can build something that functions exactly as intended and still leave them confused.

That’s part of building it well.

AI lets me carry more of a product myself than I used to. I can take discovery, design, and engineering further before a handoff, and put something working in someone’s hands sooner.

Staying close to those parts helps me see how a design decision changes the engineering, or how building something exposes a gap in my understanding. I can try an idea, see where it falls apart, and come back to the problem.

The first artifact used to be a wireframe. Now it’s understanding. Building helps me test it.

I can start almost anything. Finishing is harder.

I have more ideas than I will ever build. For years they stayed notes. Brand names. Sketches. Tabs I never closed. There was always more to think through.

The practice I’m working on now is finishing. Putting the thing into the world, seeing what happens, and giving myself something real to improve.

Understanding is the first artifact. It isn’t the last one.