Engagements tend to start in one of two ways. Some begin with something specific, a product, a flow or a tool that needs to work better, and widen once the real problem comes into view. Others begin with a broader question about what the organisation actually needs. Either way, the work has usually outgrown a simple brief: the thing being designed, the evidence around it and the organisation carrying it have to be shaped together.
Whatever the starting point, the first thing I make is a shared picture: a model, a set of flows, a map of the system and the people around it. Complex products tend to exist in several versions at once, one in each person’s head, each reasonable and each slightly different. Putting one version where everyone can see it, question it and agree it is what lets the design move, and it often settles arguments nobody knew they were having.
Most engagements run in phases: a first one that establishes that picture and what should happen next, then the design work that follows from it.
AI and complex product systems
For teams building products that people have to understand and trust.
AI tools inside sensitive work, clinical and research platforms, laboratory systems, autonomous fleets: products where the relationship between a person and the system is hard to get right and costly to get wrong. I start with who the system is for, what it should and should not be expected to do, and where the people building it see it differently. The work can lead to product strategy, system architecture and flows, permission models, code-first prototypes, design-system foundations, or the redesign of a product that has grown too fragmented to trust.
Embedded and fractional design leadership
For organisations that need senior design leadership close to the work, for a period or a few days a week.
This is the work I have led in-house for more than a decade: building and coaching design teams, setting a quality standard people can apply, running a design system as an organisational system, and connecting design decisions to the strategy they are meant to carry. Engaged fractionally, it can mean leading a team through a transition, standing up a design function, coaching its managers, or helping a team that has lost its way find a shared direction again.
Evidence and learning
For teams that need to know what their work is proving.
The work helps teams separate data, interpretation, claim and action, so they learn before they overclaim. In product organisations this can mean measurement and experiment design, research systems, or dashboards that connect evidence to decisions. In the social sector it can mean theory of change work, outcome frameworks, and evidence systems that frontline teams can actually use.
Working across these contexts is what sharpens each of them.