James is a design leader with a background in content strategy. He is currently at Nava PBC, where he is a Principal Content Strategist, a people manager, and the design lead for a delivery team. Across a variety of contract teams he’s also been a content strategy lead, scrum team lead, design researcher, and communication strategist.
Prior to Nava, he managed the content design team at 18F, a digital product consulting group within the Technology Transformation Service of the U.S. General Services Administration. 18F was a perfect greenhouse for learning to lead design strategy for agile, integrated delivery teams that build collaboratively with their clients. He managed a team of eight content strategists and served as staffing lead for designers across the full range of disciplines.
James got into content strategy by accident at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was hired from a campaign background to bring the voice of ordinary people into government. It was an interesting idea, but the new government agency kept running into a problem: every time we published something, the site seemed to need a redesign. Policy content was wedged into weird places and hard to manage, and the relationship between consumer-facing content and industry-facing content was too messy to keep aligned and timely. What good is a government website if the government’s rules aren’t findable, current, and usable? When James suggested they hire someone to help deliver and sustain coherent content, his boss said “Why don’t you do that?”
So that’s how we got here. Campaign work taught him to focus on the audience’s needs; government work taught him to value sustainable approaches that scale. He’s been putting both lessons to use to make government services better for more than 15 years now. And for the last seven years he’s been as focused on supporting other designers build their skills as he has been on his own.
James is originally from Kansas City. Today he lives Brooklyn with his wife Laura. They have a very good dog. He could always use a buddy for skiing or home fermentation experiments. He dreams about mountains.
