Designer · Caregiver · Builder
I build tools for families and test them on my own.
I’m Lynn, a product designer, former facilities manager, and systems thinker living in Albany, California with my loud, complicated, thoroughly blended family. I studied biology before spending nearly a decade running offices and buildings for San Francisco startups, first at Slack and later at Blend. Those careers turned out to have more in common than I expected. Every complex system develops failure points. Most problems aren’t surprises, they’re signals that nobody had time to notice.
The hardest systems work I’ve ever done wasn’t in an office. It was at home.
Caregivers make decisions with incomplete information all day long. Every grandparent, babysitter, teacher, coach, and family member needs a different version of the same truth. Most families manage it with screenshots, text threads, sticky notes, memory, and luck.
I think we can do better.
So I build the tools I wish existed, starting with problems my own family actually has. I prototype them, live with them, watch where they fail, iterate, and write honestly about what I learn. Most of the work you’ll find here grew out of real mornings, real logistics, and real mistakes.
Looking back, the thread is more obvious than it felt at the time. Biology taught me to look for mechanisms instead of symptoms. Operations taught me that information is infrastructure. UX taught me to design for the way people actually behave, not the way I wish they would. Studying early childhood education gave me perspective into the realities of all kinds of families, not just mine. All of these have been different ways of studying the same thing: how people share information, make decisions, and coordinate with one another under real-world constraints.
I’m endlessly interested in systems, language, education, and the quiet infrastructure that helps families function.
I have an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm for systems, edge cases, and problems that require creative solutions. If that’s your kind of work too, I’d love to hear what you’re building.