About

Public systems fail in small ways that compound. A form that doesn't save. An eligibility rule that contradicts itself. A policy that works on paper and nowhere else. I've spent my career learning how these failures propagate — and building the capacity inside institutions to catch them before they cascade.

I spent nearly a decade at 18F, the federal government's digital services unit, leading design across agencies including the VA, IRS, HHS, and DOD. That work taught me what delivery actually looks like inside bureaucracies that resist it — and how to build teams that ship anyway.

Now I teach at the University of Michigan and run Occupant, where the work is Trust & Decision Engineering: designing how authority, judgment, and accountability move through institutions as automation takes over more of the decisions. I also founded State Capacity AI, which gives governments and institutions honest intelligence on AI procurement.

I take hard problems seriously and I don't mistake complexity for sophistication.

Also, I'm unreasonably enthusiastic about pesäpallo.