Hi, I’m the Product Guy.
I'm Howell — designer, researcher, strategist, and occasional chaos coordinator for complex digital problems.
Twelve years working for brands like Equifax, Norfolk Southern, and Georgia Natural Gas have made me an unusual mix: equal parts design craft, user research, business analysis, and product strategy — with enough technical fluency to speak the same language as the engineers.
Human-Centered Vision
Uncovering User Perspectives
Teams limit the greatness of their solutions when they limit themselves to their own opinions. I've seen it happen at every level.
To combat this problem, I've applied a wide range of research methods, from usability testing and contextual inquiry to focus groups and diary studies, to surface insights that serve as the North Star for developing and prioritizing offerings.
The right research can resolve gridlock, reframe problems, and give stakeholders a shared foundation to build from.
Defining Product/Service Direction
Translating research into direction is where I find my stride. I've facilitated current- and ideal-state journey mapping, service blueprints, strategic roadmaps, and product briefs with stakeholders ranging from front-line users to C-suite executives.
It's genuinely complex work to set up and run well. But watching a room full of competing opinions converge into a unified direction is, I'll admit, kind of a rush.
Translating Strategy into Delivery
Feature Prioritization
Nothing's a priority if everything's a priority (sorry, I just love a good cliché). I use collaborative exercises to combine user, business, and technical perspectives into a full picture of feasibility, projected effort, relative value, and risk.
Affinity mapping, relative estimation, and a relentless effort to surface and resolve unknowns early — these are how I help teams build delivery plans they can actually stand behind.
Project & Program Planning
Delivery planning is rarely as simple as it looks. I've assembled effort estimates, timelines, backlogs, and milestones across agile, waterfall, and hybrid environments, managing tasks, sprints, and epics in tools including JIRA, Smartsheet, Harvest, and Microsoft Project.
The Norfolk Southern engagement is a good example of this at scale — multi-year, cross-functional, and ultimately responsible for saving 388 user-days in a single quarter.
Kickoff Preparation
A project's trajectory is often set in its first week. I've developed a consistent approach to getting distributed and cross-functional teams aligned from day one — domain onboarding, detailed briefs, early collaborative sessions, and deliberate resource planning that accounts for the logistical realities of shared and offshore teams.
Design, Refine, Build & Deliver
Analysis & Conceptual Design
My earliest professional work was business analysis — eliciting requirements, writing specs, sitting alongside architects and developers on enterprise software projects. I've never let go of that analytical mindset.
Paired with design thinking, it means I bring strong structural guidance into the conceptual phase: workshops, heuristic reviews, collaborative co-creation, and the kind of systematic thinking that keeps initial concepts grounded in what's actually buildable.
Detail Design & Dev Preparation
Conceptual alignment is the starting gun, not the finish line. Getting to a shippable product means going deep on flows, architecture diagrams, wireframes, high-fidelity comps, and style guides.
It means optimizing every element and interaction while staying in close collaboration with clients, developers, and analysts.
The Georgia Natural Gas redesign is a good example: research-driven from the start, iterated hard through detail design, and ultimately delivered a 24% increase in new customer conversion.
Cross-Functional Support
One thing I'm not is a developer. But I've worked closely with some exceptional ones — along with architects, data scientists, QA specialists, analytics leads, and SEO strategists.
My role from dev handoff through go-live is to make sure those people have everything they need to succeed: complete specs, clear rationale, and a design partner who stays engaged rather than disappearing after handoff.
Optimizing Post-Deployment
Go-live isn't the finish line either. The most valuable learning often happens after launch — in analytics, user feedback, and the edge cases nobody anticipated.
I work with teams to track outcomes, triage issues, and treat post-deployment iteration as a first-class part of the process rather than an afterthought. The goal is to suspend ego, look at the data honestly, and keep improving.
Working with AI
Accelerating the Work
I use AI tools actively across research synthesis, design exploration, content strategy, and development — Claude, Cursor, Figma Make, and others depending on the task.
In practice that means faster first drafts, quicker pattern recognition across research data, and more time spent on the decisions that actually require judgment. It's genuinely changed how I work, not just how fast I work.
Where It Gets Complicated
AI tools in a design and product context are still maturing, and the gaps are real — hallucinated insights, inconsistent output quality, and the persistent challenge of keeping human nuance in the loop.
My approach is to treat AI as a strong first pass that still requires an experienced eye: useful for acceleration and exploration, but not a replacement for the synthesis, empathy, and stakeholder judgment that determine whether a solution actually lands.
Happy Teams = Better Teams
Leadership Means Service
I prefer to see myself as a leader rather than a manager — though on a practical level there's plenty of the latter. What I take seriously is that I'm the center of a support system for my teammates.
Whether I'm informing, overseeing, reviewing, or getting my hands dirty on a hard problem, the goal is the same: make sure people have what they need to do their best work and know someone has their back.
Finding & Developing Talent
I've had genuine success finding and hiring exceptional talent across five countries — designers, researchers, and analysts at every level.
The secret isn't complicated: find people who care about the quality of their work, treat the team as a learning environment, and invest in shared experiences that make everyone stronger.
The best teams I've built didn't feel like teams. They felt like a collective.
Efficient Delivery with Work-Life Balance
Chronic overtime and crunch culture aren't badges of honor, though I’ve done my fair share. To me, they're symptoms of poor planning or poor leadership. I've made it a point throughout my career not to normalize them.
Burnout kills quality, erodes trust, and drives turnover. Sustainable pace and clear expectations consistently outperform heroics. That accountability sits with me as a leader, not with the team.
Stronger Teams through Culture
The people we work with are the people we're closest to for roughly 2000 hours a year. How are we relating to each other? What are we building together beyond the deliverables?
The teams I'm proudest of were those that celebrated successes, personalities, and quirks, and those who supported each other genuinely.