Design Systems & AI Product Leader
I'm Julie, a product design leader with about 20 years in design. Most recently I spent almost five years at Meta leading the redesign of Facebook Comments, building the Visual Asset Framework design system, and shaping how AI showed up in both. I started in graphic design, spent nine years in brand and digital marketing in New York and London, and have spent more than eleven years in product.
The work I want to do next
I want to architect the strategy and logic that train LLMs to do what used to take a room full of teams. That means teaching AI to:
Read a design system and follow content rules and a brand's tone of voice
Apply legal and policy guidance wherever it's needed
Build to accessibility standards from the start, from color contrast to screen readers
Tailor content and messaging to 100 audiences instead of one, without anyone writing 100 versions
I've already built a version of this. Cadence carries the combined knowledge of the 8+ teams behind a launch, so one brief becomes an on-brand, compliant, accessible message for every platform and every audience. The teams keep their expertise. They just stop doing the heavy lifting of getting every message out the door.
A good system should be the fastest way to make something on brand, not another round of approvals.
Lately I've been most interested in when a system should act on its own and when it should bring in a person. Attention is a finite resource, and no one wants to be pulled away for something that didn't need them. That idea shaped the Attention Signaling Playbook I wrote for Facebook's 16 billion daily notifications, and it's the premise of Cadence, my AI workflow that decides when AI can handle something alone and when a person needs to step in.
How I work
No ego, serious about craft, and committed to making the work fun. I give designers clear scope, give feedback in the moment, and write decisions down so they travel without me. I prototype in Figma, Cursor, SwiftUI, and Claude Code, because the fastest way to settle a debate is to build the thing.
Outside of work
I recently moved from New York to Apex, NC, to be closer to family, with my partner Anthony, a chef, our two kids, Cara, Jack, and our dogs Henry and Birdie. Recently we spent a month traveling Europe and food is how we learn about other cultures and how we plan every trip. Below are some snapshots from that trip all taken on my Sony a6000. I'm happiest when tech meets the tactile, whether that's my Hobonichi Techo, being a photographer, or planting a native pollinator garden with my kids, and I lead the same way I live: no ego, serious about craft, and committed to making the work fun.
If you're building systems that people and AI both have to read, let's talk.
