Still not a doctor.

Since childhood, Aaron dreamed of becoming a flaneur, but when that didn’t work out, he redoubled his efforts on becoming an artist, much to the confusion of his parents, who anticipated medical school in his future.

Somehow, all of that ended up being useful in product design.

The career arc has moved from freelancing and building a boutique agency, through a string of startups that got acquired, to design leadership at some of the largest platforms in the world. Along the way, he’s found that the most important part of the job isn’t the design itself. It’s getting an organization to see something it can’t yet see, and then making it tangible enough that it actually believes.

Design, at its best, is the sharpest strategic instrument a company has. It signals where the product is going, what the company thinks of its users, and whether leadership is making bets or just keeping the lights on. Aaron builds teams around that premise: close to the customer, fluent in ambiguity, and fast enough to shape decisions before they’ve already been made.

He’s shipped products that drove billions in revenue and a few that died a silent death. He’s rebuilt design organizations after layoffs and leadership transitions, scaled teams through rapid growth, and spent the better part of the last few years figuring out what it looks like to build AI natively into how a design team moves.

His instinct in ambiguous situations is less to wait for clarity and more to make something: a prototype, a provocation, a strategy document that gives people something to push against. Usually that’s where the real thinking starts.

He also co-founded a design community in the South Bay that grew to over 3,000 members, which is either evidence of genuine community-building instincts or just really good snack selection. Probably both.