About Lance

I’ve led design teams for more than two decades, but I’ve never been comfortable leading from a distance. I work best on difficult, ambiguous products where design, product, and engineering need to figure out the direction together. I focus on hands-on ownership of hard problems, partnering closely with product and engineering to turn emerging capabilities into usable, trustworthy experiences.

I recently served as a Design Director at Walmart, helping shape AI-powered shopping journeys across high-traffic eCommerce experiences used by hundreds of millions of people. My work included designing multimodal and generative interactions that improved discovery and task completion, with an emphasis on interaction patterns, feedback loops, and human judgment over novelty.

Previously at Adobe, I founded the company's first international design team from scratch, taking Adobe XD and mobile creative tools into Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and partnering with Alibaba and Tencent to bring Creative Cloud into their ecosystems. From there I joined Adobe Express and led design for AI-powered creative tools and extensibility platforms, driving millions of new users through SDK integrations and cross-product workflows that accelerated Adobe Express growth. While I've led teams and set product vision, I've always stayed deeply hands-on, prototyping working concepts, shipping code when needed, and closing the distance between idea and reality faster than traditional design processes allow.

I also run Mujun Studio, a bilingual U.S./Japan brand and product design practice. It's where I take on select projects between roles, applying the same cross-market instincts I built running teams in Tokyo and partnering with LegalOn, Hitachi, and Tokyo Electric — now focused on AI-native product and brand work for companies moving between the two markets.

Early agency days

Before Adobe and Walmart, there were fifteen years of agency design work that taught me almost everything I still rely on.

I started at Agency.com in San Francisco during the dot-com boom, building some of the earliest major websites for Visa, Discovery Channel, and Answer Financial. It was a crash course in web design at a moment when nobody really knew what "web design" meant yet.

When the crash hit, I moved to Tokyo. Scient Japan, the agency I joined, had shut down everywhere except Japan. That's where I got my first shot at leadership, running a team of Japanese designers and going up against local agencies to help companies like Hitachi, Panasonic, ANA, and Mitsubishi take their brands global. My Hitachi.com design work won a Good Design Award. It also taught me how to lead across language and culture, something I've used in every role since.

Back in San Francisco, I co-founded Ideas in Digital, a product design and branding studio. We worked with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and nonprofits, and chased quality over volume. ThatsNotCool.com, a cause-based site I designed for youth digital safety, won a Webby for Best Nonprofit Website.

Fifteen years of agency client work is where I built my instincts for craft, speed, and reading a room. After that, I made the jump to Adobe and started the tech chapter.

Selected Impact

  • Designed AI-powered shopping UX supporting 580M+ monthly visits at Walmart

  • Defined core multimodal interaction patterns for next-generation AI commerce

  • Drove 114% platform growth at Adobe through extensibility and SDK strategy

  • Enabled 415% growth in Express plugins via marketplace and contextual design

  • Delivered 3M new Express users through Express-Acrobat integrations

Core Strengths

  • End-to-end product ownership across UX strategy, flows, prototyping, and systems

  • AI-augmented experience design (multimodal, generative, decision-support)

  • Close partnership with product, engineering, and research teams

  • Scalable, inclusive design systems for global products

  • Design-led strategy and decision-making under ambiguity (from vision to shipped outcomes)

Video Resume

Watch my 5-minute video resume to learn about my career highlights.

Skills

  • AI-Native Prototyping & Build

  • Enterprise & Consumer- Scale Design

  • Cross-Functional Leadership

  • Executive Stakeholder Alignment

  • Team Development & Mentorship

  • Vision & Roadmap Development

  • AI-Powered Product Experiences

  • Multimodal UX ( Text/ Voice/ Vision)

  • Human-Centered AI Design

  • 0-to-1 Product Innovation

  • End-to-End Product Design

  • Design Systems & Platform Thinking

Unlost in translation

Most brands stumble entering a new market by porting home-market signals wholesale. I've spent two decades on the other side of that problem.

How I've done it

“Lance challenged the team on how we might use existing tech and create the magical experiences that customers expect from Adobe.”

— Beate Fritsch, Group Design Manager, Adobe

MIT AI Product Design Certification

I completed MIT xPRO’s Designing and Building AI Products and Services certification to gain practical, working knowledge of how to design user-centered AI products. The program deepened my understanding of AI technologies, use cases, and responsible design principles to create real-world, value-driven solutions.

About the Program

I’ve worked with:

Awards

Webby Winner - All-in-One AI-Powered Creativity App, 2024, For Adobe Express

Webby Winner - Best Nonprofit Website, 2016, For Thatsnotcool.com

Webby Winner - Campaign in Advertising, 2016 For "I am a Witness" campaign and website

W3 Award - Gold: Mobile Apps - Public Service and Activism, 2017, For Respect Effect mobile app

W3 Award - Gold: Mobile Apps - Family and Kids, 2017, For Respect Effect mobile app

W3 Award - Gold: Mobile Apps - Education, 2017, For Respect Effect mobile app

Davey Awards - Silver: Mobile Apps/Sites-Social Gaming, 2017, for Redbull online game

Communicators Awards - Websites, 2016, For Thatsnotcool.com

Japan Marketers Award - Silver: B2B Marketing, 2011, For Yokogawa's Vigilance brand campaign

Good Design Award - Best Global Website, 2008, For Hitachi.com

What People Are Saying

  • "Lance and his team of talented designers helped us drive new innovations in areas ranging from our Express marketplace of integrations to new embeddable experiences to the in-app developer experience."

    Aubrey Cattell
    VP Product, Adobe Extensibility

  • “Lance's positive attitude towards cross-team partnerships truly resonated with me and will be a reminder to keep breaking silos between teams and proactively seek partnership through user-centered design conversations.”

    Lorenzo Buosi
    Sr Staff Designer, Adobe Express

  • “Lance is super collaborative, constantly iterating on the vision and staying focused on building realistic, user-centered designs. He’s found creative, scrappy ways to explore new ideas and move things forward.”

    Keshav Agrawal
    Sr Director of Product, Walmart

  • “As a leader, Lance encourages the team to think outside the box and explore new ideas, and creativity is welcomed. Lance balances creativity with practicality to ensure concepts are imaginative and feasible.”

    Beate Fritsch
    Sr Design Manager, Adobe Acrobat

  • Lance genuinely acts in Adobe's best interest in every project he takes on, and I believe his willingness to work across organizational lines has really been instrumental in getting extensibility to the level of success it current has within the Express team.”

    Sunny Virdi, Principal PM, Adobe Express

  • “Lance's strength is collaborating with product at a high level on the strategy, and I love his strong perspectives on where our investment areas should be. He's very open to feedback and new ideas, and overall brings positivity to the culture of the team."

    Risa Shen, Principal PM, Adobe Express

  • “I have full trust in Lance's abilities to lead design teams with empathy, vision, and authenticity. The integration increased Express engagement significantly and provided Acrobat users ways to creatively edit their PDFs.”

    Jenny Woo
    Sr Staff Designer, Adobe Acrobat

  • "During a challenging period, when our team was distributed across five different time zones and the pandemic brought unprecedented obstacles, Lance's exceptional leadership made us feel incredibly close and cohesive as a team."

    Daniel Wagner
    Senior Engineer, Adobe

  • “Lance's grit and leadership under highly ambiguous circumstances is one of his biggest strengths. He has a natural tendency towards mentoring young designers in their early careers and will go out of his way to help them.”

    Julie Ip
    Staff Designer, Adobe Express