I'm Ethan Smith —  I've led design orgs of numerous shapes and sizes over the course of my career. Over the last fifteen years I’ve shifted my craft toward design leadership and org strategy: I still care deeply about design outputs, but my work now focuses on building teams, mentoring designers, and shaping how design creates business value across products that range from high touch consumer apps to abstract data models.

I scaled my portfolio back because my day-to-day is largely management and organizational development — the design organization is the product I’m shipping. I get fired up when design acts as a strategic force and when new tech reshapes what’s possible; AI, embedded systems, and proximity manufacturing are trends I watch closely. I use whatever methods fit the problem — Design Thinking, Double Diamond, Google Ventures design sprints, Agile — and try to help teams evolve to pick the right tools for the job.

I am currently involved in scaling and building methods around generative AI design tools across the digital product lifecycle. In addition we're building a philosophical framework to guide the creation of prompt based interactions to better guide decision making.

If you want someone who pairs a strong design sensibility with practical people leadership and systems thinking, we should have a chat.

You can get more info on me, my work and my background on LinkedIn.