Senior Product Design Lead & Manager. The most senior designer in the organisation, responsible for design direction, team leadership, and hands-on execution. I came in to bring structure and momentum to a product that needed both, leading a team of three that became two, without ever letting the quality slip.
Layoffs hit, resources shrank, and a homegrown design system was quietly draining what little capacity the team had left. The platform needed a full redesign, more complex, more demanding than anything the team had tackled before, and we had fewer people and less time than when we started. Not ideal conditions. Not an excuse either.
I scrapped the custom design system and adopted Shadcn, customised to our needs and built to eliminate friction between design and frontend. What used to get lost in handoff now ships in sync. I led the redesign end to end while keeping the team focused and the quality high.
Months, not years. The redesign is in progress and already validated, leadership is aligned, early customer reactions have been strong, and a smaller team is moving faster than ever. less team. better product.
