// methodology
How I Approach the Work
A decade of platform architecture, COE leadership, and governance work taught me a handful of principles that hold up under pressure. These are the convictions I bring to an engagement — and the experiences that earned them.
book a call →// principles
Adoption is earned, not mandated
I don't win a platform rollout by getting it written into a policy. I win it by making the platform the fastest path from question to answer — so teams choose it because it's the path of least resistance, not because they were told to.
// in practice
Built a Center of Excellence from zero. Within two years it eclipsed every other BI product in monthly active users and spread organically across 90+ departments — sales, marketing, and infosec opted in on their own.
BI is an accelerator layer, not a gatekeeper
A BI tool earns its place by lowering friction to the data underneath it, not by hoarding it. I architect for a federated world where the platform is the low-friction entryway to the warehouse — not a walled garden that competes with it.
// in practice
Positioned Domo as the accelerator layer in a federated architecture — aggressive SSO made it the front door to Snowflake, Athena, and Databricks rather than a silo around them.
Governance should give controls, not kill momentum
I sit between engineering and the business. The job is to give Infosec and governance teams reasonable controls they can trust, while keeping the path to value short for the people doing the work. Guardrails, not roadblocks.
// in practice
Designed PDP and user-access frameworks for secure self-service across 90+ installations, and documented security best practices spanning Qlik, Tableau, MicroStrategy, and Domo — not just one tool.
Architecture should fit the team's maturity
There's no universal-best schema. I tailor the design to each team's technical maturity, balancing maintainability against usability — and I'll recommend the boring, governable option over the elegant one when it lowers risk.
// in practice
Across 90+ installations I recommended one-big-table with joined dimensional attributes over star schema where it simplified security and reduced governance risk — and reserved the heavier modeling for teams ready to maintain it.
Metric divergence is a literacy problem, not a technology problem
When two dashboards disagree, the instinct is to blame the pipeline. Usually the real gap is shared definitions and data literacy. I treat data quality as an enablement problem first and a tooling problem second.
// in practice
Drove data-quality strategy across 90+ departments — and the durable wins came from coaching teams on definitions and maintainable practice, not from another layer of tooling.
Run the platform like an internal product
I treat the deployment as a product with users who can churn — earning trust from early adopters who tolerate iteration, then graduating to the audiences who can't. Reliability is a feature you ship, not a state you assume.
// in practice
Operated Domo as an internal data product — from early-adopter departments tolerating rough edges to the sales executive suite relying on it for VP+ board-room reporting, and distributed metrics externally to publishers as data-as-product.
Codify tribal knowledge so it outlives the engagement
The worst outcome of a consulting engagement is that the knowledge leaves when I do. I codify how things work into runbooks, maintainable code, and increasingly AI-powered knowledge stores — so the team is stronger after I'm gone, not dependent on me.
// in practice
Coached business analysts from one-off scripts to maintainable class libraries, codified institutional knowledge into runbooks, and built production agentic systems (Letta + Claude, the mdrag MCP server) that capture and apply that context automatically.
// tools I reach for
The principles come first; the stack serves them. These are the platforms and tools I work in day to day.
BI & Analytics
Cloud Data Platforms
Data Engineering
Data Warehousing
AI / ML
ERP & DevOps
Sound like a fit?
Book a 30-minute intro call. No deck, no sales pitch — just a conversation about your problem and whether I'm the right person to solve it.