Product designer with 13+ years experience establishing design vision, building research programs, and leading teams. Specialised in early-stage strategy and turning ambiguous challenges into clear product direction.
You know where you want to be in the long term, but it's not clear what you should build in the short term.
You want to get your product in front of users, but the product never feels ready.
You're focusing on details and features, but they have little impact.
Video games have taught me to focus on the core experience before adding features and polish. That’s how I work with founders: cut through the noise, identify what to focus on, and what to ignore.
Teams I've worked
Google, TripAdvisor, King, John Lewis, Nordeus, Curbee, Riff
The first thing I do is break down what the product actually is. That means mapping what's genuinely novel, identifying the core experience users will repeat over and over, and checking the foundations are solid enough to compete.
Once you understand what the product actually is, you can start to review it with the right context. When results aren't coming, the instinct is to optimise harder, tweak the button, add a feature. The problem is usually higher-level. I map out the full experience against what we've established, what each part is trying to achieve, what data exists for it, and where you're flying blind. That review usually reveals the real problem, and makes what to do now, next, and later a lot clearer.
With a clear picture of what to work on, the question becomes how to do it without creating new problems. I involve the whole team in problem-solving from the start. Not just designers and PMs. I design and build in tandem, so engineers aren't waiting on designs to start, technical discoveries feed back into the design before it's too late to change, and everyone is working from the same understanding. Changes stay incremental so you can see what's working before committing to more.