I'm Ben Roach. I turn intractable problems into clear, measurable business impact.

Some of my earliest memories are sitting at the kitchen table learning to draw from my grandfather, who was an art teacher. Those lessons in drawing sparked a lifelong love for bringing ideas to life, eventually leading me to a degree in Graphic Design.

Right out of school, I plunged into the startup world, joining a high-growth digital agency as the founding designer. This was an intense period of drinking from the proverbial firehose. I dedicated myself to the work, pulling all-nighters and absorbing wisdom from amazing mentors. Over a few short years, I advanced from solo designer to building and leading a complete department.

Eventually though, I found myself burning out on the subjectivity of the agency world and the endless, opinion-driven debates rather than focusing on what objectively worked. I moved on and joined a dedicated UX team for the first time.

It was a revelation.

Suddenly, I was mapping workflows, studying click trees, digging into analytics, and looking at the science and psychology behind user behavior. And more than anything, the ability to design a hypothesis and run an experiment to test the impact hooked me.

I'd found the intersection of art and science and never looked back.

In 2015, I packed up for Seattle to join Amazon, quickly working my way up to Principal UX Designer. Amazon was an absolute masterclass in operating with velocity at scale. It was a period of intense professional growth, designing solutions that impacted hundreds of millions of users alongside some of the sharpest peers of my career.

In 2019, I returned to Chicago when Google recruited me to found and scale a new enterprise UX organization. You can read more about that here.

Looking ahead, I'm not sure there has ever been a more exciting time to be in design. Even today, as a manager of managers, I remain committed to the principle that strong leadership requires being a "doer." The emergence of AI is completely redefining our toolkit, instantly lowering the barrier between ideas and software. It's an incredible time for hands-on builders who want to rapidly experiment, put new ideas into the world, and push the boundaries of what's possible in design.