Passionate product design leader who loves helping teams thrive.

Senior Product Design Manager at Sedex, June 2024 - Present

Responsibilities & Achievements:

• Key contributor to the development and integration of a new design team within the Product and Technology department. Employed and managed design talent of all levels to build a strong, motivated and passionate product design team.

• Positioned design as a strategic partner to product by aligning designers to cross-functional squads based on their strengths, domain knowledge and team needs - enabling more effective discovery, tighter collaboration and faster delivery of user-centric solutions. Accelerating our validation cycles from 6 weeks to 5 days and reduced duplicate effort by 40%.

• Spearheaded a team of 6 designers and researchers and mentored junior product managers through a full product replatform that improved usability, scalability and performance, delivering annual net savings of £1.5m.

• Co-created product outcomes and defined key results with senior product, technology and cross-functional Sedex leaders. Introduced continuous discovery practices that uncovered high-value opportunities worth an estimated £1.2M ARR, while deprioritising low-ROI initiatives, saving around ~£500k in projected costs.

• Designed and facilitated company-wide cross-functional workshops across the company to uncover AI-solvable challenges aligned with business goals, identifying opportunities projected to reduce manual analyst workload by 25%, and guiding leadership away from high-risk, non-feasible use cases. 

• Presenting new experience concepts and features to the broader business, the senior executive team and up to board level.

Product Design Manager at Farfetch, Aug 2018 - May 2024

Responsibilities & Achievements:

• Led ~10 designers across various levels of seniority and global locations to deliver usable and imaginative design solutions for 6 pods within Discovery and Consideration. Aligned product
  design efforts across channels with product strategy and business goals.

• Defined and drove a bold, user-centred vision for the marketplace across Beauty, Sustainability,
  Only on Farfetch and Marketplace Transformation partnering with Research, Product and Engineering.

• Translated strategic vision into clear, actionable roadmaps across cross-functional
  Marketplace teams.

• Defined the design strategy, launched new products and services, in exciting areas such as generative AI, machine learning and more, whilst taking ownership of complex processes and organisational challenges. 

• Shape and scale the team to meet evolving needs, fostering a culture that attracts and retains top design talent. Helped to define career paths, identified growth opportunities, provided support and inspired designers to do their best work. 

• Advocated for data-driven design approaches, bringing research and product analytics early into the discovery stage and testing assumptions across product & design.

Senior UX Designer at Elsevier, Sep 2017 - Aug 2018

Responsibilities & Achievements:

• Partnered with the VP of Product to shape a research-driven personalisation strategy that improved discoverability of relevant academic content for Researchers and Scholars. 

• In charge of the experience and design execution of all personalised product features whilst working within multidisciplinary teams.

  
  

Senior UX Designer at Springer Nature, June 2016 - Sep 2017

Responsibilities & Achievements:

• Spearheaded the design and implementation of the MVP Research Paper Recommendation Service, resulting in 480,000 subscribers in the first 8 months of launch (6% of total MAUs).

• Responsible for overall customer experience and product design execution, using qualitative and quantitative research to validate proposed concepts and highlight opportunities. Working with a cross disciplinary team to develop and maintain further personalised features and inspire future roadmap initiatives.

• Led the end-to-end re-design and launch of the prestigious Nature magazine.

Lead Digital Designer at FitFlop, Apr 2012 - June 2016

Responsibilities & Achievements:

• Initiated the application of a user-centred design approach to address ideas and problems across the business reducing overheads and increasing revenue.

• Engaging with the wider business by presenting qualitative and quantitative research to create clarity around the unknowns and communicate ideas for potential future roadmap consideration.

• Managing and Art Directing the Design team whilst overseeing the work of all Freelance Digital Designers. Working closely with the entrepreneurial founder who has inaugurated several successful companies.

  
  

Lead Digital Designer at The Sunday Times, Sep 2004 - Apr 2012

Responsibilities & Achievements:

• Part of the initial development team that launched The Sunday Times App for the iPad.

• Responsible for art direction and designing The Sunday Times Magazine, Style, Culture, Travel, Home and Sport iPad editions. 

• Liaising closely with all section Editors including the Editor in Chief to realise concepts.