That left one discipline, product design, and me as the only person in it. Four product designers and a researcher first. By the time I was Director it was four disciplines, not one: product design, research, content and communication design. Design stopped being a service to product and engineering and became a partner to them.
Rebuilding a function is one job. Being legible while you do it is another. Naming these three stopped the team guessing which version of me they would get on a given project, and let them ask for the one they needed instead.
When retail partners kept hitting rendering problems in the point of sale app, I set up the environment locally and diagnosed them myself. Nobody else had the context, so I went in.
On the core checkout workflows I defined the reliability bar we had to hit and left the route to the team. My job was to be unambiguous about the destination, not to drive.
Arguing for the AI work that got customers reliable answers faster. Not doing it myself, but making sure the people doing it had the room and the resources.
A mode is one person in one room, though, and one person does not scale. Everything below this is what I wrote down so the room works when I am not in it.
When I was still designing rather than leading, the team was doing what most product organisations do when they scale fast. Nobody was failing at their job. The work was simply arriving without a shared system behind it, so quality was inconsistent and alignment was fragile, and both depended on who happened to be in the room.
So I built a design operating system. Not a set of rituals and not a folder of templates. Five parts, each answering a problem on that list, and each feeding back into the roadmap, the delivery pipeline and the team.
Map the journey, reorder it by impact, slice it into increments that are worth shipping, and align product, engineering and design on the same narrative. I introduced it to replace long debates, feature-first thinking and roadmap ambiguity, and it became the backbone of how work started.
“His ability to drive UX strategy, lead with empathy, and build a cohesive design team made a huge impact on our product work.”
Jose MartinHead of EngineeringMost organisations treat research as something you do when there is time. I made it a rhythm that runs regardless: every six weeks, exploratory or evaluative depending on what the roadmap needs. The point of a rhythm is that nobody has to argue for it.
“We collaborated on a Continuous Learning strategy that brought fresh user insights straight into the product, resulting in clear, measurable improvements to the user experience.”
David HawdaleSenior UX Researcher, reported to HenningA quarterly score tells you whether the product is getting better. It does not tell you that something broke this morning. So the system has three horizons rather than one, and the slow layer is the only one most teams have.
“He has a rare ability to zoom into the smallest design details while simultaneously steering bold, strategic bets. A real superstar player-coach.”
Mitun PandeyDirector of Product OperationsContent design committed to the quality of the documentation and hit every published API. Product design committed to consistency and to the success rate of a single screen people use hundreds of times a day. Both are in the measures beside this, and both are the kind of number a design team is not usually asked for.
“He consistently pushed the limits of what his team was able to accomplish, always learning and sharing his knowledge to improve those around him.”
Levi BaadeProduct and Technology BuilderA levelling framework for product designers, content designers, UX researchers and communication designers, built on craft, mindset and context, and then aligned with engineering and product leadership so that complexity, scope, autonomy and impact meant the same thing to everyone.
“I learned so much from his empathetic and transparent leadership style. He created a space where feedback and ideas were valued, and that made a big difference for the team’s growth.”
Sarah den BoerProduct Designer, reported to HenningThe part I would defend hardest is the flagging. Any team can put a dashboard on a wall. Ours says out loud which of its own numbers it does not trust yet: a month of data missing because an analytics provider was down, a printer whose failure event was never instrumented, a completion rate that is probably measuring people forgetting to close a task rather than the task failing. A number you cannot defend is worse than no number, because somebody will make a decision with it.
The Associate App, Omnichannel Manager, the platform documentation and newstore.com. Sixty thousand people at work every day, at 90+ companies in 40+ countries.
“He isn’t a typical design or UX lead. He can comfortably think like a product person, and is really on the cutting edge of generative AI and codegen, as his team all are too. He runs rings around some of the engineers in NewStore.”
Benjamin HoskinsChief Technology Officer, NewStore“He builds design culture, influences how teams think, and helps shape the way we work. He is a builder, a mentor, and someone who always shows up with a strong sense of purpose.”
Phil GranofChief Marketing Officer“The best design leader I have ever worked with. He has the Midas touch to make everything sharper, clearer and more impactful.”
Scott MatzaHead of Product“He does not limit himself to his immediate scope. If he sees something that could be improved he steps in and takes initiative without fanfare, and he plays an active role in shaping the culture of the company.”
James LunanSolutions EngineerEight years of it at NewStore, where I am still Director of Design, and products of my own alongside. If you are hiring someone to lead design, or to carry an idea from a conversation to a thing people use, both of those are on this site.
Smaller doors too: coaching someone building their own product, or taking yours apart with you and handing over how I solved the part you are stuck on.
