About
Ian.
Leader. Designer. Facilitator. Based in Vancouver, with a family, a garden, and strong opinions about process.
I lead product organizations with a design background, which means I’ve spent years doing more than design. I’ve led product. I’ve led engineering. I’ve hired, scaled, reorganized, and shipped. I’ve built departments from nothing and helped others understand why their existing systems weren’t scaling.
My career started in craft: UX, visual design, front-end development. I loved the work. But what pulled me upward were the organizational problems underneath the design problems. Why was this decision so hard to make? Why did the handoff keep breaking down? Why did the team keep shipping the wrong thing?
At Copperleaf, I got to answer those questions at scale. Over seven years I built a design function that grew from 3 to 22 people, helping the company go from a scrappy team shipping one product to a $1B CAD IPO with three. I learned what it means to design an organization: the hiring decisions, the cultural norms, the processes that scale and the ones that don’t.
Energized by people, driven by ideas, and unreasonably convinced that the right conversation can solve most things. I try to use that energy to create environments where people feel genuinely safe to take risks, say what they think, and do the best work of their careers.
Outside of work: you’ll find me outside in the woods with my family (Arlo, Audra, and Deborah), cooking something that takes longer than it should, or facilitating a conversation that was better for having someone at the front of the room.
Right now
Outside work
Ethos
How I think about leadership.
Three things, in order. Get the order wrong and you feel it everywhere.
People
Support the person, elevate the team.
Everyone on a team has their own communication style, growth goals, and definition of meaningful work. My job is to understand that, then create the conditions for each person to do their best work. The team performs when the individuals flourish.
Processes
Less is often much, much more.
Process should serve the work, not protect itself. The right process is the minimum structure needed to keep communication clear, decisions fast, and quality high. It changes as the team changes. Open, clear, and frequent communication is the foundation everything else is built on.
Product
Align value to the work.
People do better work when they understand why it matters. Not the company ‘why’ from a slide deck. The actual human why. Who uses this? What does it cost them when it doesn’t work? What changes when it does? Helping a team stay connected to that is one of the most underrated things a leader can do.
Career
The path here.
Chief Product Officer
·EstateablyI lead product, design and AI strategy for an estate administration platform used by lawyers, paralegals and trust officers across Canada and the US. I set the vision and portfolio priorities across our three product pillars. Right now that means getting us ready for bank and trust company clients, and moving our AI work from R&D prototypes into features customers pay for.
Director of Product
·EstateablyIntroduced company-wide quarterly objectives and built the company’s first dashboards across product, finance and sales, so leadership could finally see what was on track. Wrote the design principles we still use (clarity, confidence, flow), set up product job ladders, and started the AI platform work.
Co-Founder
·UXxUX unConferenceCo-founded a design unconference in Vancouver where attendees set the agenda. Attendance grew 280% over three years, to 190+ people in 2024, and attendees rated it 4.8/5 (4.9/5 said they’d come back).
SVP of Product and Engineering
·Data Dive ToolsJoined as Head of Design, became VP of Product and Design, and was SVP of Product and Engineering eight months in. We reached $3.2M ARR. Onboarding went from 42 minutes to 5, key actions on a core product doubled, and platform churn stayed under 6%.
Senior Director of Design
·Copperleaf TechnologiesStarted as a UX Engineer and left as Senior Director of Design, nearly seven years later. I founded the company’s first design team and led design through the IPO, while revenue grew from $20M to $100M+. The Copperleaf Design System came out of that period; it made development about 20% more efficient and usability 48% better.
User Experience Engineer / Product Designer
·MediaValet and InfoMineFive years of redesigning SaaS platforms, building reusable components and front-end architecture, and slowly realizing that the problems worth solving were organizational.
Kind words
From the people I’ve worked with.
“…leads by example, knows how to foster a strong design culture, and how to elevate people’s skills and strengths to the next level. Additionally, he knows how to create a psychologically safe environment that allows everyone on the team to contribute with thoughts and ideas.”
Bruno Alves
Principal Product Designer · Copperleaf
Skills
What I’m good at.
Leadership
- Design Team Building
- Hiring & Interviewing
- Performance Management
- Cross-functional Collaboration
- Design Culture & Ops
Product
- Product Strategy
- Roadmap Planning
- Stakeholder Alignment
- OKRs & Success Metrics
- Go-to-Market Thinking
Design
- Design Systems
- UX Research
- Information Architecture
- Interaction Design
- Systems Thinking
Let’s talk.
Design leadership, consulting, speaking, mentorship. I’m open to conversations.