Blue Origin

Overview

Blue Origin was scaling toward one of the first commercial human spaceflight programs while simultaneously building the manufacturing, operational, and customer systems a spaceflight company requires. I spent four years working across that complexity — defining product strategy for internal operational platforms, founding the company's first Experience Design organization, driving enterprise AR/VR adoption, and architecting the commercial astronaut experience. The common thread: turning a rapidly scaling, safety-critical aerospace environment into systems that people and teams could actually operate.

The Challenge

A spaceflight company has to solve two hard problems at once. It has to build the vehicle — and it has to build everything around the vehicle: the manufacturing execution and supply-chain systems that produce flight hardware, the operational workflows that govern mission readiness, and the customer experience that takes a civilian from a deposit to a seat on a rocket. These systems were being built in parallel, under safety constraints, in an engineering-led culture where "experience" and "operations" weren't yet first-class disciplines. The work was less about designing any single artifact and more about making disparate, high-stakes systems coherent.

My Role

I started as a Senior Product Manager over internal operational platforms and grew into Senior Manager of Experience Design, leading a cross-cutting function that eventually reached across programs company-wide. My scope spanned product strategy for manufacturing and supply-chain systems, the creation of a new organizational capability, enterprise AR/VR strategy, and the end-to-end astronaut journey — sitting at the intersection of product, operations, engineering, and human experience.

Approach

Operational systems first. I defined product strategy and roadmap direction for internal platforms supporting manufacturing execution, supply-chain coordination, and flight-hardware production — the unglamorous systems that determine whether a spaceflight company can actually fly.

Build the capability, not just the deliverable. Rather than arguing for design in the abstract, I led design-driven projects that delivered measurable wins for programs and operations, which generated real demand — and that demand became the company's first Experience Design organization. A global design language system tied together a dozen bespoke internal applications, raising quality while reducing the time and cost to build and maintain them.

Bring emerging capability into the workflow. When AR/VR was surfacing in ad-hoc pockets around the company, I was asked to lead the corporate AR/VR vision and strategy — framing the business cases and standing up the people, products, and processes that moved immersive tools into real engineering and manufacturing workflows, improving quality, safety, and throughput.

Make the human experience operational. As a core member of the New Shepard astronaut team, I led the astronaut experience strategy — the goals, principles, personas, and service blueprints that shaped business strategy, operations, and policy for commercial human spaceflight.

Key Contributions

• Defined product strategy for manufacturing-execution and supply-chain systems producing flight hardware

• Founded and scaled Blue Origin's first Experience Design organization, eventually cutting across programs company-wide

• Created a global design language system unifying a dozen bespoke internal applications

• Led the enterprise AR/VR vision and strategy, integrating immersive tools into engineering and manufacturing operations

• Architected the end-to-end commercial astronaut experience, from marketing and sales through training, launch, flight, and post-mission

• Selected as "Astronaut 6" in the first full operational rehearsal of a New Shepard mission, delivering customer-experience insights that shaped requirements and processes for Blue Origin's first human flight

Outcomes

The operational platforms supported the manufacturing and readiness work behind New Shepard. The Experience Design organization outlasted my tenure and was elevated to a director-led function after I left — a signal that the capability had become structural rather than personal. The AR/VR strategy moved immersive tools from experiments into standard engineering and manufacturing practice. And the astronaut experience framework shaped how Blue Origin's first commercial human flights were designed and run.

Reflection

Spaceflight makes a general truth unavoidable: in complex technological environments, the hardest and most valuable work is rarely a single interface or feature. It's getting technology, operations, and human experience to cohere — under real constraints, where the cost of incoherence is measured in safety, not just satisfaction. That's the work I keep returning to, in every environment since.