People Leadership · Player-Coach · Ways of Working
Leading Design Teams
"The best design teams are built on trust first, process second — and neither works without the other. Over the past decade I've led teams through structural transformation, organisational uncertainty, and significant change. What I've learned is that the operational work only lands when the people work comes first."
Chapter One
Waitrose — Transforming the way design worked
What I inherited
Waterfall pretending
to be agile.
Team of 8 designers running separate sprints in isolation from the product squads
Waterfall in disguise — design handed over completed work, developers sat idle waiting for it to arrive
Developers frustrated, designers disconnected, stakeholders raising concerns about delivery pace. The team was capable. The system wasn't.
The Diagnosis
To fix delivery,
I had to fix belonging.
The problem wasn't the designers. It was the structure. By keeping design separate, we'd created a handoff culture. One that positioned design as an upstream phase rather than a team player.
What I Changed
Embedded, not a resource.
I restructured the team around four core areas of product focus. One designer embedded in each squad, not as a resource allocated to a team, but as a genuine member of it.
Squad
Customer
Squad
Buying
Squad
Loyalty
Squad
Foundations
Designers joined sprint planning, stand-ups and retros as full participants
Design work tracked within the squad's Jira workflow, not a separate board
Shared ways of working established with engineering leads and product managers — shared language, shared ceremonies, shared accountability for delivery
The Human Challenge
People leadership.
01 — The offshore transition
Visible, challenged, present
Two offshore designers really struggled with proposed changes. They liked design being its own team with its own culture
A lead designer who'd been acting as informal manager — my arrival created real tension that needed careful navigation
Took directness and patience — acknowledging their experience while being clear about how things needed to work
02 — Getting into the room
From downstream dependency to strategic partner
From day one, pushed to be in product strategy meetings as a contributor, not a passenger
Over time, operating at the intersection of design and product strategy — shaping what we built before a brief was written
Result: design stopped being a downstream dependency and became part of the decision-making process
03 — Cross-functional ways of working
Design-led. Not design-only.
Introduced 3 amigos sessions across design, product and engineering — design-led but explicitly inclusive. Result: shared ownership of solutions, earlier surfacing of technical constraints, delivery unblocked at discovery rather than fixed at handoff.
The 3 Amigos flow
3 Amigos
Result: shared ownership · earlier engineering input · delivery unblocked at discovery, not fixed at handoff
04 — working with product
Design doesn't need to win. The customer does.
PM wanted heavy signposting throughout a new onboarding flow. Designer in my team and I felt the design would do that work naturally — over-signposting would make it feel harder than it was
Real tension. My job wasn't to pick a side — it was to keep the conflict from becoming personal and anchor everyone on the right question: what's best for the customer?
Stepped in, laid out both views openly with the product lead, agreed on a phased A/B test. Let the data arbitrate where instinct couldn't.
Let the data
arbitrate where
instinct can't.
Waitrose — Business Outcomes
The results spoke clearly.
It took roughly a year for the new model to feel genuinely embedded — not as a forced change, but as just how things worked. By the time I left in 2024:
+48%
CSAT target surpassed
4.7
App Store rating on iOS
4.5
App Store rating on Android
7.53%
User-to-customer conversion vs 6.93% target
40.6%
Online revenue share vs 38% target
100%
Accessibility task completion rate
The team had moved from isolated specialists to embedded partners. Designers had real relationships, real ownership, and real impact on the products they were working on.
Chapter Two
OVO — Leading through uncertainty
A different kind of challenge
The challenge wasn't
structural. It was environmental.
When I joined OVO in 2024, the challenge wasn't structural — it was environmental. A fast-moving, high-ambiguity organisation going through significant change. Two rounds of restructuring during my time there. Role changes. Uncertainty about the future. A team of designers who needed to feel safe enough to do good work through all of it.
Working with Engineering
Fix the cause.
Not the symptoms.
App quality issues showing up in App Store reviews and senior leadership feedback
Audited the entire app screen by screen — every mismatched pattern, incorrectly used component, drifted visual hierarchy
Brought the full design team together to work through findings collectively — collaborative, not top-down
Presented the vision to engineering first: systematic approach means fewer one-off decisions for everyone
Started with high-visibility components to demonstrate impact quickly and build momentum
Outcome
+40%
Improvement in renewals journey in-app — a direct commercial result from a design and engineering decision made collaboratively and executed systematically.
Building Psychological Safety
Trust is built in the margins.
Every 1:1: person first — their interests, ways of working, what they liked and disliked.
When redundancy rounds came: stayed honest, stayed close, made sure no one felt like they were navigating it alone
Performance managed two designers — direct about impact, maintained dignity throughout. It works when trust is already there
Management support score — OVO
6.8 → 9.8
Within six months
The Player-Coach Dimension
Holding leadership
and craft simultaneously.
Beyond the people work, I was design lead across multiple AI squads at OVO — working cross-functionally with product and engineering to deliver both customer-facing features and internal efficiency tools.
AI Direct Debit Agent
£5.5m
Business value delivered through an AI-powered explanation tool designed simultaneously across customer and advisor surfaces.
PAYG App Redesign
−15%
Complaints
99.9%
Top-up success rate
End-to-end redesign of the PAYG customer experience.
What this adds up to
Across both organisations, the through-line is the same: I build the conditions for designers to do their best work — structurally and humanly — and I stay close enough to the craft to know what best work looks like.