I bring over 20 years of experience as co-founder of strategy and innovation consultancy Jump Associates, where I advised corporate clients and intrapreneurs at big companies like Target, HP, Mars, and Audi. In addition to leading teams, I’ve shaped a culture of constant learning and growth supported by peer and expert coaching.

I launched Abbizzo to focus my strengths on individual contributors, entrepreneurs and leaders: listening closely, revealing possibilities and solutions, sketching out and creating their strategic stories to catalyze action and garner support for new businesses and initiatives.

I have a B.S.Eng., Product Design from Stanford University and started my career at Ford designing SUVs. I’m in the SF Bay Area.

Everyone has the potential to be great, and helping people realize their potential provides an addictive sense of meaning for me.

The Abbizzo Approach

An abbozzo (“ah-bot-zo”) is an Italian word for “a rough sketch”. One is done quickly with bold strokes, or thoughtfully to convey what’s to come, with expression over precision. A finely detailed sculpture is visualized with several abbozzi before it’s carved in stone. 

An abbozzo can help you see, develop, and communicate an idea in process. An abbozzo is a quick and dirty prototype that also helps you learn and make progress.

I use abbozzi to solve problems big and small, from product ideation to value mapping to constructing storylines in narratives, pitches, and scripts.

In my coaching it often comes into play explaining a complex idea in a simple, visual way. Sometimes it’s sharing something I’ve learned with you. Sometimes it’s capturing your wisdom and reflecting back to you, visually, with a rapid, loose hand sketch.   

Hand-sketching is fairly common in the world of design and design strategy, as well as other design disciplines. But most people don’t know how to sketch, and they’re reluctant to pick up a pen for fear of making a messy line. 

Abbizzo is more than a sketch for biz-ness. It’s about taking a creative and iterative approach to defining something new. It’s about liberating the mind and acting quickly to make an idea real, then make it better.