Work
I frame the problem before I solve it.
How I approach client work
I’ve spent more than 20 years in design, 16 of them at Slalom, where I’m a Senior Principal in the design practice and have led design for more than 50 brands. The work belongs to the clients, so I don’t name them or show their screens. Here is how I work, in my own words and others’, and what two engagements led to.
On most projects I’m the Engagement Lead, accountable for the delivery, the client relationship and the team, and I stay hands-on. How I lead, with what colleagues say.
The principles I work by
Find the right problem
Before any design work, I make sure everyone understands why it matters. Teams stay committed through the hard stretches when they know the reasoning, not just the decision. On a recent engagement, I challenged the team to question the why behind design choices, not just the mechanics, and led the ideation workshops that clarified requirements and personas.
Sid leads with humble curiosity and empathy, always seeking to understand the problem from different perspectives and find the best way to solve it.
Be transparent early
I favor transparency over protective silence, which leaves people guessing. Clients and teams hear difficult news while there is still time to act on it.
From “Two things that made me a better leader”Make it real early
I’m a painter and photographer as well as a designer, and I think by making. At an internal AI hackathon in 2026 I built a working prototype with Claude, then ran a lunch-and-learn on my prototyping workflow using my own personal projects.
Design for trust
As products start acting on people’s behalf, I treat transparency as the core design problem: people should be able to see what a system decided, and why.
Leave the team stronger
I teach how to think, not what to answer, and I invest in the growth of the people around me: mentoring, hiring, and leading learning sessions.
Two engagements, told without names
Here is what two of them led to, with the clients and their screens kept private.
Building a design foundation for scale
The client asked for a design system. What they needed was a stronger design practice.
The result: a functional design system in 10 weeks, with 26 responsive components, new design standards, governance and team mentoring. The engagement earned Slalom Seattle’s Summit Team Award for Innovation.
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The challenge
The client came to Slalom for a design system to address inconsistent experiences across its products. As we got into the work, it was clear the problem ran deeper. Products needed redesigning, the design team was relatively junior, and there was no established design governance. A component library alone wasn’t going to solve that.
My role and approach
As Engagement Lead and Experience Strategist, I drove the engagement from strategy through delivery, working closely with the client and our cross-functional team. I reframed the original ask around a broader goal: a consistent design practice that could support a growing product portfolio.
That meant aligning design, product and engineering around shared standards, guiding the team’s priorities, and investing in the client’s people as much as the system we were building.
The outcome
Over five two-week design sprints, the team delivered a functional design system with usage guidelines and developer specifications, including 26 fully responsive components. Across the 16 weeks, we also mentored the client’s design and product teams, introduced design governance, and established more consistent ways of working across design and engineering.
Slalom was a partner that delivered results that were far beyond my expectations, impacting not only my design team but our entire product and engineering organization.
Designing experiences, growing partnerships
The strongest client relationships grow when the work earns the next conversation.
A six-week engagement led to a second phase. Over nearly two years, I helped shape four more phases of UX work and supported a content-platform pursuit, and the account grew from a two-person team into a multi-workstream partnership.
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The opportunity
What started as a small, two-person engagement grew into a broader partnership across experience strategy, product design and technology. I was first brought in to shape a five-week UX workshop for a new marketplace experience. That work led to more engagements, including the digital experience for a sustainability program that was one of the client’s organizational priorities.
Leading the experience
As the experience strategy lead, I led a six-week engagement to shape the new website and product experience. Working closely with the client and our design team, we ran discovery across key pages and user journeys, facilitated stakeholder workshops to establish alignment, and built clickable prototypes to test and refine the experience with users.
The project was highly visible, with high expectations for both the quality of the design and the speed of delivery. Our iterative approach let us fold in feedback throughout, stay aligned with stakeholders, and deliver a substantial body of design work in six weeks.
From delivery to continued partnership
The success of the first engagement led to a second six-week phase. I also worked with the account team to shape four additional phases of UX work and supported a separate content-platform pursuit. Over this period, the account grew from a two-person staff augmentation engagement into a multi-workstream partnership.
The design is on the exceptional level from what I have seen in this company, especially given the volume of work done in this short amount of time.
The thinking hasn’t changed. The tools have.
I still run projects on design thinking, one step after another and iterating as I learn. AI compresses every step, from the research to the build, and what used to take days now takes a few hours.
I’m the human in the loop at every step. I validate the research, the synthesis, the brief and what gets built.
I design agentic experiences, and build with agents.
Agentic UX
Designing for products that act, not just respond. When an AI agent makes decisions on someone’s behalf, the work shifts to what it is allowed to do, how it shows its reasoning, and when it hands control back to a person.
The functionality is fantastic, the visual design is clean, modern, and intuitive… the stakeholders are LOVING the work. Sid has rapidly accelerated our deliverables while testing out this new beta Figma feature.
In practice
- Travelographer uses AI to work out where a photo was taken and where to stand to recreate it. When it isn’t confident, it says so. It also suggests which lens to use, based on the gear in your profile, or gives iPhone tips if that is what you shoot with.
- SATcrack has Claude write fresh practice questions and explanations live, after the student has learned the strategy.
- I build working prototypes with Claude, and teach other designers how.
Where the work has been
Industries: technology, retail, financial services, healthcare, energy, telecom, travel, entertainment, real estate, life sciences and scientific research, for clients in the US and Japan.
How: agentic UX, end-to-end product and service design, co-creation workshops and design sprints, design systems and design ops, and building the design practice itself.
20+ years in design. 50+ brands.
Most of the work belongs to my clients, so it isn't shown here. What I can share is how I approach it, and I’m happy to talk through relevant projects directly.