Coming
Soon
I build lab environments where teams experiment boldly and ship results that matter.
A Sr. Director of User Experience with ten-plus years in leadership. Five as Sr. Director. One persistent belief: the best innovations come from lab-like environments — but only if they make it to market.
Experimentation and execution aren't opposing forces. They fuel each other.
Most organizations treat them as a tradeoff: move fast and break things, or move slow and ship quality. I think that's a false choice. The best teams I've built — and the best work I've seen — live in the overlap, where experimentation has guardrails and execution has room to breathe.
That overlap doesn't happen by accident. It takes deliberate culture work: making it safe to be wrong, making it expected to iterate, making it non-negotiable to ship. When those three are aligned, teams move at a pace that feels impossible from the outside.
Four principles have held up across every team I've led:
Safe to experiment. Accountable to ship.
Psychological safety without shipping pressure becomes theater. Shipping pressure without psychological safety breaks people. Both, together, is the only version that works.
Data-driven, but not data-paralyzed.
Insights should accelerate decisions, not delay them. When teams treat data as a gate instead of a guide, we've stopped doing research and started doing procrastination.
Learn from failure. Then iterate quickly.
Failed experiments aren't sunk costs — they're the rawest source of truth a team has. The only question that matters afterward is: what do we try next, and when?
Empathy fuels speed.
Understanding users and teammates isn't soft — it's the single biggest accelerant I've found. Teams that take the time to understand move faster than teams that assume.
Developing people who can experiment and execute.
Individual excellence on a team that doesn't know you is wasted excellence. I've watched brilliant people stall because nobody outside their immediate org knew what they were capable of. The PIE Model is how I coach around that — a shorthand for three things that matter equally.
Three elements to career success.
Feedback in my world is a Start / Stop / Continue conversation that happens all year, not a quarterly checkpoint. And when I'm thinking about what a team needs to ship, I hold myself to the Four P's: Purpose, People, Process, Product — in that order. The Product will always be better if we address the Purpose, People, and Process matters first.
Curiosity, as a through-line.
The thread that ties the professional work to everything else is curiosity — the same instinct that makes me want to understand why a UX experiment didn't land is the one that makes me want to understand why a cocktail recipe works. Different domains, same muscle.
I spent a decade-plus in digital commerce and UX leadership, but I'm increasingly drawn to where digital experiences meet physical ones. Pop-up events. Spatial design. Moments that can't be A/B tested. The Kelmistry Lounge — the home bar my wife and I built during COVID — started as one of those experiments and has quietly become R&D for what I want to do next: bring the same craft and rigor I apply to digital experiences into the physical world.
The best ideas rarely come from the room you're supposed to have them in.
The space where we play — where there's no agenda, no deliverable, no stakes — is often the space that frees us up for bigger thinking. The Kelmistry Lounge isn't a break from the work. It's where the work gets room to breathe.
Kelmistry itself is the experiment.
I'll be in a Sr. Director role for a few more years. What comes after is genuinely still being written — and I think that's the right answer, not a placeholder.
There are a few hypotheses running in parallel. A consulting practice, eventually — leadership coaching, UX and commerce strategy, omnichannel experience design. A collaboration with my sister, who's launching an event planning business I'm helping shape into something bigger over time: not just events, but the kind of gatherings that become the stories people tell for years afterward. And whatever else turns up that's worth chasing.
I'm not rushing to pick one. The whole premise of Kelmistry is that the interesting answers come from running experiments, paying attention to what works, and letting the shape emerge. So that's what I'm doing — in public, at my own pace.
If any of that resonates — if you're building a team that needs to ship like a lab, or you've got an experience problem that crosses mediums, or you're curious about a collaboration — the door's open.