The Exponential Lightkeeper

A response to the Product Designer role at Open AI.

Genesis
The rate of change is exponential. Few people understand the implications of what this means. Everything stable that we take for granted about life will change - including our definition of what it means to be human.

We spent the last 2,000 years converting physical atoms to digital bits. Over the course of the next twenty years, we will convert those bits back to atoms all while encoding consciousness into the data - then begin beaming ourselves across the stars.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this is why I conceived of the initial seed for algirhythm (my consultancy) nineteen years ago. I wanted to ensure that no one drowned under the tsunamis of change that are racing towards life as we know it. 

The goal of algirhythm is to help people identify what resonates (rhythm), then teach them how to connect that true nature with their intuition (the “i”). That is the only way to thrive and maintain your quintessential essence, as we hurtle through this AI driven gateway into the exponential age. 

The First Wave
I saw the writing on the wall in 2015, when I unknowingly became an AI-first product designer. That’s when I was invited to redesign Macy’s dot com experience and ended up pivoting their corporate strategy. 

The punchline was you ship bits, print atoms, then pay our customers for their data in a reverse subscription fee. That data would in turn feed the AI models, while also funding a new digital currency. Customer actions across all touchpoints and purchases would convert into points, then be used to buy any product at Macy’s. This radical new vision liberated customers from their primary pain point - persistent exclusions on discounts.

After one year of developing the vision, Amazon patented a similar idea. When the CEO messaged a piece of our work on the earnings call, the stock jumped 10%. I gave a talk with the VP of Customer Experience at DEFCON 25 (the largest hacker conference in the world). It was a master class on how to transform intractable culture from inside the organization. The talk resonated so much that after the twenty minute Q&A session, someone came up to me and asked if I could be their mentor. 

One of the key pieces of Macy’s transformation was journey mapping in-store checkout. The process was so complex, that I ended up leveraging my film and sound design background to shoot in-store checkout like a reality tv film. The CEO immediately ordered sweeping updates to fix the in-store experience. Sometimes the prettiest deliverables aren’t what make change happen, but understanding how to creatively hack the prevailing narratives does.  

Irresponsibly Long On Myself
When the Macy’s op was finished in 2018, I had a big decision to make. I either spend $250k on an MBA to get in front of CEOs faster, or reinvent myself with the proper skill set that optimized for the exponential age. 

I opted for the latter and self funded a two year sabbatical combining design thinking, ethical hacking (physical security, OSINT, and social engineering with a specialization in groups), long wave socioeconomic cycles, and entrepreneurship. I knew there was a massive change about to happen in 2020, but I didn’t know what. This concoction of skills are the new necessary baseline to design anything while improving our length of quality of life. The foundation enables you to see the future, build resiliency, and withstand uncertainty. 

During my sabbatical I wrote the first draft of my book called The Product Paradox (working title). Think Art of War but as a playbook to effectively move teams towards collective action in dynamic environments. I developed a three flywheel product design model that every successful company will have to leverage in order to thrive in an AI driven world. 

I gave another DEFCON talk illustrating how the real intent behind the legalization of cannabis was a mass social engineering play to renegotiate the social contract of the world. When you legalize cannabis, you simultaneously legalize industrial hemp. That unlocks a new baseline commodity input for a constellation of industries spanning trillions of dollars. The talk predicted the rise of the BLM protests two years in advance, as well as the smoldering sentiment towards civil war in the United States. 
The last project of note was hypothesizing how Bitcoin is a really tactical nuke, designed to implode the financial system - but not in the way you might think.

I also completed meditation teacher training, quit a two-pack a day smoking habit ($11k/year), taught myself Figma and Webflow, rebuilt my website, and designed a custom tarot deck from pictures I took of street art. The money I saved from quitting smoking paid for a location scouting trip for a documentary film about Cuba. The caper ended up turning into a digital ethnography of life in Havana by decoding street art and living with locals for two weeks.

Ethical Hacker Meets User Experience Designer
Prior to my sabbatical, I grew a deep skillset in cyber security. I self funded APSE (Advanced Practical Social Engineer) & MLSE (Masters Level Social Engineer) certifications. The instructors train real intelligence professionals from various military and government agencies. From the hundreds of people trained, I was one of only a handful that were invited back for MLSE.  

My experience combining Security and User Experience started with Americans Elect. The mission of the stealth project was to produce a web app where anyone could vote for a president on the internet. I was the Lead and only UX designer on a team of thirty, incubating a political startup on-site at an ad agency in New York City.

The high velocity accelerator experience was like collapsing four startups into one. Imagine merging a dating site, a question answer site, American Idol, secure electoral voting with counter ID fraud, and tying everything back to a common data genome. This is on top of building better than bank level security, and garnering more than $20 million in donations - all in under a year.

Aside from owning the end-to-end experience, I mapped the entire product adoption rollout, built a war room that enabled the whole team to breathe, and engineered “better than bank level” security flow (according to RSA) for the experience. This was all while striking the right balance of security, scale, and ease of use at the same time. After working on this kind of complexity, no other website compared. 

Shipyard Proving Ground
The second innovation lab I worked in was called Shipyard at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto. I ran the product design for Coke’s first mobile native and Spotify desktop app (back when they had an app store) called Coke Placelists. A social jukebox attached to a location. 

This endeavor required building a war room at Facebook HQ, facilitating multiple workshops, and finally negotiating and documenting design decisions between Coca-Cola, Facebook, Spotify, and LBi. The experience was a masterclass in organizational politics as much as it was a crash course in socially engineering viral loops and the cultural implications of pervasive algorithms.

Seeing What’s Next
What sets me apart from other designers is my depth of experience working on large, continuous, and complex projects at scale. No other Product Designers share my diverse client roster, have deep cyber security experience, and understand how to read financial statements.

The AI pioneers of the future need to be guides and guardians, not just technologists and scientists. In order to secure a safe future for everyone, a future where no one gets left behind - the product design will be just as important (if not more important) as the underlying technology. At the core of the experience you’re talking about amplifying the purest essence of a human. Their spirit. This is why I’m an AI-first product designer, because this is not just a job to me. It’s my destiny. 

As we pass through these storms of change, the world needs light keepers now more than ever. So when people get lost at sea, they can find their way back to the shore. If I do my job right, what I’m really doing is helping guide people back to their true selves. Back to their own light. Then they become light keepers too. That’s what exponential product design is all about. Force multiplying positive change, and showing others the way by becoming the purest beacon of your own light.