Hey, I'm Kyle.

I'm a full stack product design leader.

I've spent my career at startups across a range of industries, from weddings to outdoor communities to B2B permitting. My work tends to live at the intersection of design, code, and product.

Some days I'm deep in Figma pushing pixels and refining interaction details. Other days I'm building AI workflows to recap product updates, sketching out a programmatic SEO strategy, writing a PRD, prototyping directly in production, or opening a pull request to fix a bug that's been bothering me. I enjoy tinkering. I like understanding how things work under the hood. If something really needs to ship, I'm happy to help make it happen.

Like most designers, I care about details, but I appreciate when pragmatism is needed over perfection. That doesn't mean things don't look good, it just means that building effective products often means making compromises for the sake of timeline, engineering constraints, or other variables. Launching things that solve problems and learning from the feedback is sometimes more important than pixel pushing.

I was already pretty technical (for a designer) before LLMs — comfortable in codebases, writing some front-end code, talking to engineers about databases and tradeoffs. But, developents in AI, over the last 2 years in particular, has taken that further. I use LLMs frequently to prototype features in production codebases with dummy data, fix bugs, stress-test PRDs for edge cases, and turn rough stream of thought notes into more structured documents. Claude Code, Lovable, and v0 let me explore interaction ideas faster than Figma. I can hand an engineer something running in real code instead of a static mockup, and that communicates intent way better.

I think this matters a lot right now. Teams are getting leaner, and design roles are blurring with product and engineering in ways that aren't going back. The “super IC” who can prototype, write a PRD, ship code, and think strategically — that's increasingly what teams need. I'm constantly tinkering with these workflows and building side projects to keep up with how fast it's all moving.

Outside of product work, I write Here & There, a weekly newsletter about outdoor and travel culture that I've published for over six years. It covers industry trends, conservation, the business side of the outdoors, and whatever else I find interesting. It's read by brand founders, outdoor media, and people across the industry.

Wes Allen of Sunlight Sports, an industry voice I highly respect, says “Kyle is one of the most adept and insightful voices in outdoor right now. He has a remarkable ability to make the intricacies of the current outdoor industry compelling, understandable, and entertaining.”

The two sides feed each other. Design makes my writing better: taking complicated topics and making them clear is the same muscle as simplifying a product experience. And writing makes my design work better: so much of good product strategy, whether it's writing a clear, understandable PRD, an internal roadmap, or product vision. Much of it comes down to storytelling and good writing.