CX/UX/UXR/AI Design Leader · London & able to travel · Open to Head of Design and Ops roles
I’ve built design teams and units at Barclays and HSBC. I specialise in trying the thing first, then standing a team up around it. Barclays’ first voice and chat design team. Remote user testing during the pandemic. Skills mapping and team restructure. I now lead Design Operations and Optimisation at HSBC.
AI has raised the stakes, putting even more pressure on the argument about design’s value. It amplifies depth of craft, and challenges what a team can show for it. I opened agentic tooling to designers, drove governance, guardrails and evaluation, and scaled it across the functions. The first design team in the bank inside an engineering toolchain.
Next I’m looking to lead a function where the complexity is real and the ambition for customer experience is high. And where I drive the open question of what AI makes of design, craft and standards.
How I lead
Six principles, shaped by building design functions and leading the teams inside them.
Lead by doing
Model the standard you’re setting. If you’re asking teams to present better, present better first. Credibility comes from visible practice.
Translate to business language
Design becomes part of how the business thinks by articulating value in terms stakeholders care about: reduced risk, cost savings, faster delivery and the customer feedback that backs it up.
Build for the team you’ll leave behind
Sustainable leadership means creating conditions that outlast your involvement. Playbooks, progression pathways and the confidence to use them. Those now have a second reader, because agents inherit whatever a team writes down.
Structure enables creativity
Governance, clear roles and shared standards free teams to focus on what matters, and the best structures are the ones teams help build.
Co-create, don’t impose
The most durable change comes from solutions teams and stakeholders see their own priorities reflected in. Transformation sticks when people feel ownership.
Design for the people it reaches
The best work happens when the stakes are human, making essential services simpler, more trusted and more accessible for the people who depend on them.
Recent experience
Design and research leadership. Most of it in regulated environments, where the decisions carry consequence.
HSBC
Global Corporate & Institutional Banking
Dec 2023 – present
Design Operations & Optimisation Lead
- Built the design operations function from scratch: the governance framework, ways of working and capability standards the team now runs on
- Opened AI development tooling to the design team: set the guardrails that made it safe to scale
- Consolidated a fragmented global tooling estate into a single enterprise agreement
HSBC
UK Commercial Banking
Jul 2021 – Dec 2023
Design Domain Lead, New Propositions
- Led design across new propositions on HSBC Kinetic: Best App-Based Business Bank Account 2022 and 2023
- Designed in-app international payments, moving a service run over the phone into self-serve
- Moved research onto remote unmoderated methods: faster validation cycles at a fraction of the cost
Adobe
International, fixed-term
Dec 2020 – Jul 2021
Strategic Development Manager
- Embedded Adobe XD and Creative Cloud inside global enterprise clients’ design workflows and culture
- Ran immersive training and Creative Jam events for client-side champions and leadership teams
- Launched the Creative Motivations webinar series, supporting junior designers through the pandemic
HSBC Kinetic
UK Commercial Banking
Mar 2020 – Dec 2020
Senior UX Design Manager
- Led UX delivery across onboarding, open banking and everyday banking through the app’s early growth
- Delivered the UK’s first-to-market Bounce Back Loans application, under pandemic pressure
- Ran sessions with external open banking design teams: clearer regulatory understanding, more confident design decisions
Barclays
Conversational Design & AI
Dec 2018 – Mar 2020
Design Principal (VP)
- Founded Barclays’ first conversational voice and chat design team, across app, Messenger, Google Home and Alexa
- Set the design method and validation approach for conversational UI from the ground up
- Founded a bank-wide accessibility working group and built the training programme behind it
Selected work
Examples of my design leadership in action.
Design Capability for the AI era
Design was fragmented, so I rewrote the structure, roles and responsibilities, the governance and the tooling estate, then took the team into the engineering toolchain and onto agentic workflows.
Read the case study → 2022–24 · Capability buildingA Common Language for Design Quality
Design quality was a matter of whose opinion was in the room, so we built eight heuristics, translated them into CX principles the business could own, and made every review leave a record.
Read the case study → 2017–20 · Deep craft, done first-handFoundations: Barclays
Founded Barclays’ first conversational design team. Drove the research and service design that showed where colleagues were losing hours of their week to tech. Enabled jobs to be done across Premier Banking savings and investments. Trained colleagues across the bank in accessibility.
Read the case study →I’m always glad to hear from
These are the conversations I get most out of. I love to chat with people who are passionate about:
Get in touch- Teams hiring a design function lead, particularly where the complexity is regulatory or technical
- Leaders working out what governance for AI tooling actually looks like in practice
- Anyone building DesignOps from nothing and deciding what to standardise first
- Researchers and ResearchOps people trying to make good practice survive contact with delivery pressure
- Mixed-media artists, hackers and people who make things with plotters, code, thread, 3D printers or laser cutters, for entirely personal creative reasons!