hi. i'm brad.
i translate customer signals into fast, confident product decisions.
chicago-based. builds from zero. outcomes that stick.
I've spent 20 years working across content, information architecture, design, research, and operations. That range shapes how I see problems and how I work to solve them.
My point of view took shape in 2011. I was working at Encyclopaedia Britannica and spending weeks embedded in classrooms across the country. In a fourth-grade classroom on Chicago's South Side, I watched kids tease a classmate. The site she used for reading time had big fonts and bright colors. To them, that meant she was on a "kiddie" site.
Later, her teacher told me how hard it was to find differentiated materials for the range of reading levels in her class. Even when she found the right ones, the way they looked could single a student out and push them further behind.
This struck me as a problem Britannica could address. It already published four encyclopedias, each written for a different reading level. I brought it back to the office and shared it with my cross-functional partners.
That observation became a feature: students could switch reading levels for 90% of articles with no visible change to the interface. It shipped and became the product's defining feature.
This taught me that the insights that move products forward don't always live in dashboards. They live in the moments people don't think to mention, but you have to get close enough to find them. Then you have to build the teams and systems that can act on what they reveal.
Outside of work, I listen to a lot of house music and take many, many silly pictures of my dog.
Four principles shape how I approach every project: get close, clear the noise, measure intentionally, build to last. Each case study traces one through real work, in sequence. Each leaves behind infrastructure on which the next is built.
