Placemaking and the Human-Scale City
On designing public space around the speed and scale of a person on foot, not a car.
Product manager.
Ten years at DonorsChoose — most recently as Group Product Manager, leading product strategy for the $60M two-sided marketplace connecting donors with public school classrooms.
Experience
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DonorsChoose
2016 – 2026- Group Product Manager 2025 – 2026
Owned product strategy across the $60M marketplace — activation, success, and retention for 200K teachers and 400K donors a year. Built the product experimentation practice from scratch, tripling test velocity, while managing and mentoring junior PMs.
- Product Manager → Senior Product Manager 2022 – 2025
Led the pod building the teacher side of the marketplace. Launched Classroom Essentials, the first extension of the core product model (+26% teacher activation YoY), and rebuilt universal search (+25% teacher conversions YoY).
- Digital & Growth Marketing Manager → Senior 2019 – 2021
Managed the team of three growing the donor community. Stood up the email and CDP stack from scratch and owned the lifecycle program raising $35M/year from small-dollar donors.
- Digital content roles 2016 – 2019
Marketing associate through digital content manager — social and video strategy, including live video reaching 1.4M people a year.
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- Partnerships & communications
At the nonprofit behind the placemaking movement — where the essays below come from.
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- Live video production
Telepresence deep-sea exploration aboard E/V Nautilus.
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Side project
Nothing New
Nothing New delivers public-domain classics — poems, essays, letters — as paced email newsletters. Readers choose a cadence (a poem a day, an essay a week) rather than confronting a complete text all at once; the pacing is the product.
Visit Nothing New →Writing
Essays from my time at Project for Public Spaces — about cities, and about the same instinct as my product work: how design shapes the way people actually encounter a place.
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Bridges and Placemaking
How infrastructure becomes — or fails to become — part of a neighborhood's life.
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Starchitects and Campuses
Why signature architecture so often produces spaces people walk past rather than through.