A few years ago at Disney+, I redesigned the page you land on right before you decide whether or not to watch something.

Not the homepage. Not the player. The page in the middle. The title details page. The one nobody at the company was looking at because the home page got all the attention and the player got all the metrics, and the page in between was just... there.

I watched real users navigate it. Listened to where they hesitated. Talked to people about why they bounced before pressing play. Then we redesigned it and shipped. The results? A double-digit lift in engagement across millions of active streaming screens. Bumps in engagement for trailer plays, watchlist adds and overall clicks. And the users who added a title to their watchlist renewed their subscriptions at significantly increased rates, against a baseline that wasn't anywhere near that.

That story is most of what I do now.

I read users for a living. Not in the survey-template, "rate your experience 1 to 5" sense. In the sit-down-and-watch-them, "okay why did you actually quit the funnel" sense. Then I take what they said and translate it into the kind of decisions a product team can actually make this quarter.

The reason it works is unspectacular. Most product teams I've seen, including the ones I was on, get pulled away from the user faster than they want to be. The roadmap gets crowded. The framework conversations get longer. By the time anyone has a free week, the user research that would have answered the question is two quarters in the past.

The wedge for what I do is simple. Anyone can build a product now. Cursor, Replit, Lovable, the model consoles, the agentic stacks. Building is the part the tools handle. Knowing what your users actually want is the part the tools don't touch. That's the gap I close, and it's the gap that turns into revenue when it gets closed.

How I got here

I grew up in North Carolina. Graduated from Elon University in 2005, then moved to Washington, DC for my first job out of school. Customer support at the Associated Press. I'd planned to do that for about a year and then go figure out what I actually wanted to do.

I stayed at AP for 11 years, moving from customer support into software installation, then release management, then product. The throughline, the one I only saw clearly later, was that I kept getting pulled toward the customer nobody else wanted to read: the complaint sitting unopened in the queue, the person who had been stuck for weeks. I learned early that the ticket nobody bothers to open is usually the one with the most to teach you. That instinct is most of what I do now.

After AP I moved to New York and joined MLB Advanced Media, which became BAMTECH Media, which became Disney Streaming Services, which became Disney Streaming, which became Disney+. I helped ship Eurosport, ESPN+, and Disney+. The title-page redesign happened during those years.

In 2022 I moved to Perry Street Software, the queer-owned company behind SCRUFF and Jack'd. I led product for queer dating apps used by millions of people. Two years of work that taught me more about reading users than any framework, deck, or roadmap I'd touched before it.

Today I'm based in Washington, DC. By day, I'm a product manager at Capital One. More and more, though, my real focus is helping clients get their products off the ground and out into the world.

Founded in 2024. Queer-owned.

Why queer-owned matters here

Perry Street isn't a line on my resume. It's the reason I think the way I think about product. Designing for queer users at scale is not the same as designing for the default audience you read about in PM blog posts. The assumptions are different. The trust dynamics are different. The cost of getting it wrong is different.

Two years of that work changed how I do research. It made me slower to trust the survey, faster to trust the conversation, and almost allergic to the kind of product thinking that decides what an audience wants before it has actually listened to them. Those instincts apply everywhere, not just queer-product. They're the reason the work travels.

Level Up Product is queer-owned by design. Not as a marketing flag and not as a category. It's about what it's always been about: community. I built this so the people I trust most, including a lot of friends in product and adjacent fields, had a place where we could do good work the way we actually wanted to do it. That's a real motivation, and it shows up in the way I take the work.

How I think about product

There are four beliefs that shape how I think about product work.

1. The first thing I believe is that most product decisions are research questions in disguise. If a team is arguing about which feature to ship, the answer is usually 15 user interviews away, not 15 more meeting hours away.

2. The second is that velocity without research is just speed in the wrong direction. The AI tooling era hasn't changed that. It's made it more important. The faster you can build, the more expensive it is to build the wrong thing.

3. The third is that the best PM work is the work the team owns afterwards. I'm not interested in becoming a permanent layer of your org chart. The good engagements end with a written report, a walkthrough call, and a team that knows what to do next.

4. The fourth is a belief I've held for twenty years: products are always better when the people making them are actually having fun. Building things is hard work, but the day‑to‑day collaboration shouldn't feel like a slog. The best strategic breakthroughs usually happen when we're relaxed enough to look at the data with an open mind and a bit of humor.

Who I work with

Mostly founders and product leaders at consumer apps, B2B SaaS, and entertainment / media products. Sometimes queer-led businesses where Perry Street experience is the obvious fit. Stage ranges from early (you have an idea or a v1) to growth (you have revenue and stalled metrics). The throughline is teams who already suspect that the gap is somewhere they can't quite see on their own.

I take two engagements at a time on purpose. The work I do is the kind where one client gets all of me, not a fractional slice of an account-managed plan. The trade-off is that the calendar fills early. The upside is that the work lands.

If you want to see the four tiers, what each one includes, and what they cost, the Services page walks through it. If you'd rather feel things out first, a free 30-minute fit call is a real option, and so is a paid Strategy Session if you already know what you want to dig into. Both paths are on the Contact page.

If any of this sounds like your team, let's talk.

The fastest way in is a Strategy Session. The lowest-commitment way in is a free fit call. Either is fine, and I'll tell you straight if I'm not the right person for what you need.