Jan 2025 – Present · 1 yr 2 mos · London Area, United Kingdom · Remote

• I help founders and leaders establish and scale world-class product design teams through coaching, strategic advisory and fractional leadership.

Aug 2020 – Dec 2024 · 4 yrs 4 mos

• I joined Monzo six months before the pandemic. We had over a million retail customers, and a Design team of 25 across product design, user research and brand design. We were racing to scale as fast (and responsibly) as possible. And then the pandemic hit, which led Design to shrink to 12 people.
• In 2024, Design at Monzo is 60 people, supporting over 10 million retail customers, and hundreds of thousands of Business Banking customers.
• Throughout my five years I:
• Built, scaled and led the product design team, culture and community of practice. Going from 15 when I joined, to 6 during the pandemic, to 30 product designers in 2024.
• Partnered with cross-functional partners in Product, Marketing, Engineering and Data to drive strategy, product decisions and executional quality in Operations, Borrowing, Financial Crime and Business Banking. (Sequentially, not all at the same time.)
• Overhauled product design’s hiring process, career framework and design reviews to raise the bar for quality and consistency in Product Design across Monzo.
• Built strong design functions from scratch in three product areas: Operations, Financial Crime and Wealth. Before identifying, hiring and developing the design leaders to lead them.
• Hired 20+ designers and managers. Coached hiring managers on decision making and strong, inclusive hiring practices.
• Interviewed 500+ product designers and was a regular interviewer of senior product leaders and user researchers.
• Partnered with leaders in User Research, Brand Design and Product Design to scale Design’s overall leadership team and community of practice throughout Monzo.

Oct 2019 – Aug 2020 · 10 mos

Nov 2018 – Oct 2019 · 11 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Babylon’s mission is to make healthcare affordable and accessible to everyone. I joined as the first Design Manager helping hire and scale an Experience Design org from 15 to 65 in 9 months; building out Product Design, User Research, Content, Service Design and leadership functions.
• So far, during my time at Babylon I have...
• Hired and led an Experience Design team of 15 across multiple tribes focused on consumer-facing (iOS and Android) aspects of preventative health, future disease risk simulation, diabetes management and personalized health plans.
• Directly managed 8 designers and 1 manager—6 at any one time—in addition to leading design crits and coaching sessions to support team members' professional development beyond my immediate remit.
• Led the creation of many operational processes, rituals and artifacts to support onboarding, hiring, goals and review cycles. I also created the format for and lead our weekly visual stand-up across the Experience Design org.
• Collaborated with content strategy, product management, brand design to create alignment and set direction for Babylon's consumer-facing educational offerings.

Nov 2015 – Mar 2018 · 2 yrs 4 mos · New York City

• I spent the majority of my time at BuzzFeed leading Product Design for all consumer-facing digital products including iOS, Android, BuzzFeed.com, Tasty and content publishing tools. I managed 5–8 IC designers, collaborated with 3–4 design managers to run BuzzFeed's overall Product Design team of 20 and was one of six people in BuzzFeed's consumer-facing tech leadership team overseeing ~100 engineers, designers, product and data folks across 9 groups. My role involved four main themes—
• People Management: ensuring direct reports are engaged, unblocked and effectively set up to grow and thrive in their careers. Specifically: regular feedback, bi-annual reviews, goal setting and career ladder calibration. I also led the creation of our company-wide design process to improve collaboration within and beyond Product Design.
• Team Operations: ensuring Product Design operated smoothly. Specifically: a big emphasis on transparency and improving written and verbal communication; sourcing, interviewing and hiring candidates, evolving our recruiting and internship processes to increase diversity and fairness; managing budgets, coordinating team events and guiding team culture + morale.
• Group Leadership: collaborating with leaders in Product, Eng, Data Sci to ensure the 100+ folks we (consumer tech leadership) were responsible for were allocated effectively and working on the areas of highest impact to BuzzFeed's consumers and business. Specifically: leading regular re-orgs and evaluating associated trade-offs, managing internal communications (+ desk moves), defining roadmaps, staffing needs and channeling direction from senior management.
• Design Direction: ensuring BuzzFeed ships high quality digital products. Specifically: running bi-weekly design critiques, feedback in Basecamp, collaborating with designers through design sprints, defining new design initiatives and carving out designer time to develop less engineering-centric projects e.g. design principles.

Jun 2014 – May 2015 · 11 mos · New York City

• While the devices that people wear daily have gotten better at generating more and more data, they still all fall short at giving people true meaning and clear path to improvement. Our mission was to use clinically relevant data to make users’ health understandable and actionable, and that required incredibly tight collaboration between R&D, Hardware, Firmware, Software, Data, Marketing and Design.
• My role was to lead UI-facing projects. These typically started with questions as broad as "What does long-term mean throughout our product?", "How do we encourage good behavior despite poor overall health?", "What is our perspective on time and what latency expectations should we set?" before distilling down to something that more closely resembled a feature or section that was then taken all the way through to implementation. These three example questions ended up turning into Trends, Profile and System Messages. This involved a highly collaborative cross-disciplinary process that saw me balancing my time between UX/UI, facilitating brainstorms and product management.
• Unfortunately, the product didn't make it to market, but I'm very pleased with where we managed to get to and look forward to seeing this space develop in the near future. The company was formerly known as Project Florida.

Sep 2013 – May 2014 · 8 mos · New York City

• I've worked with a number of startups, technology companies and consultancies to create, prototype and launch new digital products. These engagements typically last 1–3 months depending on the nature of the problem and team involved. I've performed a variety of roles but find I work best when leading the UX on a project, collaborating with a small team of 3–5 people.
• + Google Maps — UX/UI design for the tour introducing users to new Google Maps in early 2014
• + NY Times — Research, prototyping and market validation for new content-based products
• + Smart Design — UX/UI design & prototyping for an Internet connected thermostat & iPhone app
• + Behance (Adobe) — Unifying icon design across the Behance network and visual design for CCN
• + Greenhouse — UI design for the core mobile web experience
• + Boxee — UX/UI design, prototyping and research to improve sharing video content in Cloudee

Mar 2012 – Aug 2013 · 1 yr 5 mos · Coasterica (Brooklyn, Hawaii, San Francisco)

• Coastermatic allows you to print your Instagram photos onto stone coasters. It started as an MFA Entrepreneurial Design project exploring ways to enable people to personalize their homes. After initial success the product transitioned into the growing company it remains today.
• There were only two of us working on the project, which required leveraging a very broad range of skills. While we collaborated on creating the business fundamentals, sourcing a manufacturing partner, logistics and the overall user experience, my focus was more toward the visual aspects of our company. This included branding, UI design, photography, film making and overall art direction. In addition to these fundamentals I also wrote HTML/CSS code, wrangled Shopify templates, and wrote copy for marketing, social media and customer support.

Feb 2010 – Sep 2011 · 1 yr 7 mos

• Mint is a 30 person+ digital agency, based in London and New York. The company has evolved a lot since I joined, while I was there we split our time between thinking up & executing social web and mobile applications for TV broadcasters and international brands, as well as launching our own products.
• During my time as Design Director I was responsible for all aspects of design output for the company, from leading UX on client engagements, to developing internal workflows to recruiting and managing a team of 4 designers distributed across 2 continents specializing in disciplines including art direction and user experience. I closely collaborated with the Creative Director to ensure quality craft and execution extended to the output of the whole organization, not just the design team.
• I lead UX on projects for clients including:
• + Speedo USA
• + United Colors of Benetton
• + BBC
• + Channel 4
• + River Island

Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 · 3 yrs

• I joined Mint as the 7th hire. See above for detail.

Aug 2006 – Dec 2006 · 4 mos · Exeter, United Kingdom

• A collaboration with an independent graphic designer. I designed and built websites for bands and music venues, as well as taking care of the day to day admin of running a business.

Apr 2005 – Jul 2006 · 1 yr 3 mos · Exeter, United Kingdom

• I designed and built websites for a broad range of local businesses in and around Exeter, England. One site I created while there, urbanplanters.co.uk, won Best Website at the 2007 FMA Franchise Marketing Awards.