Capabilities
Design Leadership
As a design leader I hire and build multi-disciplinary design teams as well as mentor designers & define career paths. I establish design principles & frameworks. Perform quarterly roadmap planning and prioritisation. And create a culture of open feedback & inclusion.
Knowledge sharing & education
If you want to raise the level of design quality, you need to create an environment that fosters it. I’ve presented at General Assembly; Strategies to take customer feedback and embed those insights in designs. Teams often miss this and jump to what they are being told to do. During my time at Sauce AI, I taught the research team @Atlassian how to enable any PM to self serve product insights without needing to go a central research team.
Enterprise SaaS product design
My product design process is about working closely with PMs and engineers. Whiteboarding direction and developing POCs — than it is going away for days and creating a complex canvas of solutions in Figma. I flesh out project briefs and break down priorities creating clarity for everyone involved. I specify user flows, interaction rules, run weekly user testing to validate solutions, and draft audience-relevant copy that is clear.
Evidence driven strategy
I use research to validate product problems that can originate from what users are saying in Intercom, Slack, and traditional surveys. I also piece together a broader understanding by analysing statistics to understand user behaviour. These insights are then prioritised into user stories or JTBD. New insights often lead me to run more user testing, research, and construct surveys to validate further.
VOC user research & testing
When you have new product ideas in several Slack channels, unresolved support issues in Intercom, survey feedback in google sheets (and more!) It’s hard to keep on top of everything customers are saying. I help businesses find the right tools to create a VOC repository. I can also setup traditional user-testing as part of your PDLC — improving product usability.
Establishing design systems
I develop design systems that improve operational speed, by removing repetitive work within each squad. Using Figma to scale flexible components across teams. I specify props, variants, and naming structures. Define primitives, patterns, and layouts. Part of this process also includes specifying knowledge bases, asset repositories and backlogs. Learn more on systems I build ->
Marketing sites
I consider a SaaS marketing site as its own product. With conversion goals that typically represent the initial stages in a customer’s journey. It has its own terminology, measurables, and design resources. As a Design Lead, you’re facilitating the crossover between Marketing -> Onboarding -> and Product experience. And helping internal teams understand that customers see this as just one experience.
Marketing assets & explainers
Good products aren’t just usable, they’re also easily understood. As your use-cases and ICP expand, so do your feature-sets. Social posts, email updates, and help article imagery all form part of a healthy product eco-system. I always consider how product and marketing teams work together to produce these assets as they all pull from the same design language.
Brand strategy & identity design
I’ve designed identities for tech companies, small businesses, construction companies, and for a litigation service for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – called Ngiya.
My process covers developing brand stories, values, and strategy. Ideation across departments to manifest a vision. Routinely elevating all brand collateral & socials. Using research to align your brand identity with positioning. And managing identity assets & guidelines.
Product visions & visual storytelling
Sometimes it’s hard to understand a new product, feature, or general direction when it’s just words on a powerpoint slide. I work with founders to visually tell stories and express your product or brand vision.
Participatory design workshops
I organise and run “Participatory design workshops” (up to 15 attendees) which are collaborative sessions that actively involve end-users, stakeholders, and domain experts in the design process to co-create solutions. You can learn more about the activities I organise in the book Gamestorming.
Hand made print works
My roots in design started with print and packaging. Custom producing brand collateral, invites, and presentation materials. My first year as a designer provided me with hands-on offset printing experience with plates, inks, stocks, finishes, and die-cuts.