About - Designing for the work, not the demo.
Lead product designer for complex enterprise software in financial services. The work is concentrated on operational platforms where the stakes are high, the constraints are real, and the measure of success is whether the system runs without failure at scale.
Twenty-five years across product and experience design. Started in the early web era, moved through consumer product, then spent the last decade in regulated industries, the most recent six concentrated almost entirely on financial services. The shift from consumer to enterprise wasn't planned so much as discovered. The problem density is higher. The work is harder to fake.
- Years designing software
- 25+
- Sustained enterprise engagements (ANZ, Macquarie, Wpay)
- 3
- Enterprise design systems built from the ground up
- 2
Specialisation - Operational software in regulated industries
The last six years have been concentrated almost entirely on financial services platforms. Payments infrastructure at Wpay, credit risk tooling at Macquarie, institutional banking interfaces at ANZ. The domain has operational, regulatory, and organisational complexity that most product design work doesn't encounter.
Impact in financial services isn't measured in conversion rates or satisfaction scores. It shows up in exception volumes, error rates, support escalation patterns, and the number of compliance breaches that didn't happen. Designing towards those signals requires fluency in the domain, not just the interface.
How I work - Three principles I'll actually defend.
Not rules, but positions arrived at through enough experience with what breaks. I'll push back on a brief to protect these.
- Reframe before designing.. The stated problem is rarely the structural one. Time spent at the start of an engagement surfacing constraints, mapping the operational context, and interrogating the brief almost always changes what gets designed.
- Failure paths are first-class.. Consumer products treat errors as edge cases. In financial services, failure modes are where the operational risk lives. Designing failure and recovery paths with the same rigour as the primary flow is non-negotiable.
- Sustainable over sophisticated.. The most elegant solution the team can't maintain is a liability. Design decisions need to survive team turnover, product pivots, and regulatory change. Longevity is a constraint, not an afterthought.
Outside the work - Spanish, travel, and Collingwood
Learning Spanish. Currently somewhere between functional and embarrassing, which feels about right for year one. The practice of being bad at something complicated is a useful counterweight to the work.
Otherwise, travel whenever I can get away, because nothing resets the brain faster than landing somewhere new with no idea how anything works. The gym most mornings, the one habit that reliably holds the day together. Toby (the dog) for the walks that turn out to be the most reliable thinking time in the day. And a Collingwood tragic, which is its own ongoing exercise in managing expectations.