I Build Things That Outlast Me

Three principles have defined my career more than anything else. Craft. Accessibility. Stewardship.

Craft means pride in the work. Doing things at a level where I don't have to scramble before letting someone into my files or put in extra hours before my thinking can withstand scrutiny. Even if it doesn't nail it on the first try, the work should be defensible. Representative of someone who's doing the best effort to do good work.

Accessibility means rigor. Not the off-the-shelf veneer that represents a tick box instead of an actual accessible experience, but genuine consideration of people with different abilities. Through research, through testing, through building it into the foundation rather than layering it on after.

Stewardship is the one I want to talk about. And it's the one that's increasingly driven every decision I make about how, where, and for whom I work.

What Happens After the Cameras Leave

I've seen my own work thrown away. Multiple times. Clients where political machinations within the organization churned up months of effort. Budgets and personnel changes that let things die on the vine. New leadership that wanted to put their stamp on something, so they scrapped what was working and started over.

The one that stuck with me most was American Express. We brought an agile workflow and a test-and-learn philosophy to a huge, slow-moving, monolithic organization. Tons of great work. Tons of documentation. Real impact on the folks we were working with. And then another faction pulled ahead, drove the decision-making a different direction, and the rigorous approach we'd been building got sidelined.

That experience taught me something I've carried into every engagement since. There are only a few ways to make sure your work actually survives contact with the organization that has to live with it.

The Work That Lasted

Almost a decade ago, I led the redesign for the Better Business Bureau. 110 disconnected sites across two vendors consolidated into a single ecosystem and design system. It involved a ton of user research, stakeholder interviews, speaking at their national conference, presenting to their board of directors, recording users to verify whether their self-reporting matched their behavior. We worked in concert with the marketing team to make sure the information architecture aligned with SEO and SEM strategy. And we built a design system that took existing offline branding and brought it into digital for the first time.

You can go to bbb.org right now. The visual system stayed in place for eight years. The structural system is still there. A decade later.

That's what stewardship looks like when it works. And the gap between the BBB outcome and the AmEx outcome tells you almost everything about what makes the difference.

With BBB, I was able to get my arms around the organization. Broad conversations. Everyone felt listened to. Everyone saw their input reflected in the work. With AmEx, there were black boxes. Corners of the organization I couldn't reach. Stakeholders I couldn't make sure were being heard. The work was good in both cases. The durability was completely different.

Bicycles, Bugattis, and PT Cruisers

Agencies almost always arrive with blue-sky energy. Shoot the moon. Wild dreams. And the reality is that if most organizations were capable of operationalizing the things agencies come in and sell them, they wouldn't need the agency in the first place.

I worked at an agency that loved to tell clients "we can build bicycles or we can build Bugattis." And it always drove me nuts, because it doesn't get to the point of why we're there. The question isn't what *we* can build. The question is what *they* need.

Does this organization need a bicycle? Build it. Does this organization need a Bugatti? Build that. Does this organization need a PT Cruiser with a few miles on it and a cigarette burn in the passenger seat? Then build *that*, and build it well.

A huge part of my work has always been this conversation around feasibility. Whether a given organization can actually operationalize what we're proposing. Sometimes we're punching past where they can reach at the moment, but we're giving them a roadmap to get there. Being a force multiplier. Working with a product team, a marketing team, a design team, helping them get more out of themselves than they could have without us. But then making sure that part of what we deliver is a way for that to become their new working reality. Not a monument to what we built for them. A foundation they can build on themselves.

That means processes. Documentation. Making sure people understand how the work works. Making space where people can be honest about their struggles and where the gaps are.

Three Projects, Three Versions of Durability

Alta Window Fashions was an organization that was far behind digitally. A huge part of that engagement ended up being me leading their internal team members, their marketing team, even their executives through a digital transformation. Pulling them forward. Getting them even with the market. Ready to present a viable consumer-facing experience where they'd previously only been B2B. And part of that was taking 2,000+ dealers in their network who had no digital presence at all and giving them one. The systems, the documentation, the design language. All built so they could keep going after we left.

Carvana's Dash saved seven figures in compressed enterprise licenses and created a single source of truth for 20,000+ employees. I designed it entirely, and I built it knowing that the internal design team, the engineering team, and the governance team all needed to understand what existed, where, for what reasons, and how it could be extended and evolved. When I exited that project, it was in a space where the next person could pick up the threads and move forward.

Postino Wine Cult was about sustainable growth. The subscription wine club was doing well in Arizona but hadn't found traction in other markets. We ran targeted market-specific surveys, statistical analyses on referral patterns, and set up a foundation that was designed to ask questions continuously. Not future-proof, because nothing is. But set up to make the product and the offering better and better over time. The structure still holds.

The Counterargument (And Why It's Fair)

Plenty of people I respect say some version of "that's not my problem." They were hired to design the thing. Whether it lives beyond them, whether a client can maintain it after the fact, that's someone else's concern.

I get it. And it's a perfectly reasonable position. Upsettingly mercenary to me, but reasonable.

Here's where I've landed. There have been plenty of times in my career where I've looked around and realized I care more about the success of the project than the people who hired me to work on it. Alone on an island, wanting it to be successful, feeling strongly about what would drive that success, and seeing nobody else in the room with the same urgency.

That's a difficult position. And what drives me out of it isn't self-righteousness. It's empathy for whoever comes next.

Whether it's someone internal picking up the work, a new agency taking over, or a person who just got hired into a role they're still figuring out. I want them to look at what Jeremy did and see work they can understand. Work where they can pick up the threads and start moving forward. Because I've been the person who walked into the room where someone thought they had all the answers, opened the drive link, and found something completely different from what was promised. Not as good as they thought it was. Not as strong as it needed to be. Fundamentally out of line with where we thought we were.

And then you have the conversation. We need to do this again. Or we need to adjust our expectations. Or sometimes you just do it without saying anything, because it's the only way to get the work done at the level you're comfortable with.

Why Product Work

The thing about agency work is that the incentive structure stops at delivery. You do the consulting swoop and poop and fly away without repercussions. (I can say that. I've been the agency.)

But products and design aren't just for the end user. We're not only designing solutions for the person on the other side of the screen trying to make a transaction or sign up for a service. There's a whole other set of users. What happens if the product works? What happens if it keeps working? What happens if it only works for certain people? What if the market demands a pivot? What if a new marketing lead wants to change the colors but you don't want to restart the entire system?

The work has to be resilient, not brittle. And the people inside the organization who live with it every day need to feel confident maintaining it, extending it, making it their own.

That's what appeals to me about product work. Not just bringing the stewardship mindset and the attention to detail and the consideration for users beyond the end user. But doing it in a context where the work grows and flexes and evolves over time. Where I can empower peers and collaborators to work at the same level and feel confident in what they're delivering.

Building things that outlast me. That's the thread through everything. And the longer I do this, the more I realize it's not just a professional principle. It's the only version of the work that actually matters.