Expertise - Areas of focus
Twenty-five years across product and experience design, with the last six concentrated almost entirely on large-scale platforms in financial services. Payments, credit risk, institutional banking. The four areas below are where the work consistently produces outcomes that hold up under operational, regulatory, and engineering scrutiny.
Enterprise platform design
Large-scale operational software in regulated industries is the primary context. Financial services platforms across payments infrastructure, credit risk tooling, and institutional banking interfaces, where the work is constrained by compliance requirements, operational risk, and the need to run without failure at scale.
The problem rarely reduces to a single screen. Enterprise platform design means resolving the tensions between what users need in context, what engineers can safely build, and what the business is permitted to do under its operational model. That resolution requires more than interface design. It requires fluency in the domain.
- Operational workflows
- Regulated environments
- Lifecycle and state design
- Failure and recovery paths
- Stakeholder management across business lines
Design systems
Establishing the shared foundations that allow teams to build consistently at speed. Token architecture, component contracts, governance models, and the operating norms that prevent the system from fragmenting as product teams scale.
At Wpay, the Connect platform design system was built from the ground up across payments and merchant management surfaces. Component coverage and contributor onboarding drove a 40% improvement in front-end developer velocity over the rollout period. The system is maintained by a cross-functional team using a governance model designed for longevity.
- Token architecture
- Component contracts
- Direct codebase contribution
- Governance and operating model
- AI-assisted handoff
Research and problem framing
Surfacing constraints that sit upstream of the interface. The work here is diagnostic. It surfaces where the stated problem diverges from the structural one, and reframes the brief accordingly. In regulated environments, this often means translating operational and compliance constraints into design requirements before any screens are drawn.
At Wpay, this meant turning sub-merchant onboarding (originally scoped as a form redesign) into a platform-level workflow with a state machine, asynchronous verification paths, and a governance handoff protocol. At Macquarie, a similar reframe identified that the credit risk workflow was failing not at the decision point but at the information-gathering stage three steps earlier.
- Discovery and stakeholder management
- Constraint surfacing
- Brief reframing
- Research translated into platform-level decisions
Design and build
Designing and building working output, not just specifications. The aim is to reduce the gap between what gets designed and what gets built, through direct codebase contribution, working prototypes, and AI-assisted handoff that makes intent legible to engineers without translation loss.
At Wpay, this has run across three threads. Direct Angular contribution to the Connect component library, a Figma annotation grammar that encodes interaction states and edge cases into the design file itself, and coded prototypes used to validate interaction patterns before they entered the build queue. The approach is selective, applied where the handoff gap is widest, not as a default process.
- Codebase contribution
- Working prototypes
- AI-assisted handoff
- Spec-in-codebase
- Selective application
Ways of working - How the work gets done
A few operating modes that recur across the engagements above. Less about methodology, more about the conditions under which the work tends to produce results that survive contact with the organisation.
- Close to the room. Working inside the operational context rather than consulting from a distance. The relevant decisions are made in meetings that designers are rarely invited to. Getting into those rooms, or building relationships with the people who are in them, is where the work actually starts.
- Decisions traceable. Every significant design decision gets a rationale that someone can reconstruct six months later. Not as documentation overhead but as operational hygiene, reducing the cost of revisiting decisions when business context changes.
- Long-arc engagements. The work that produces durable outcomes tends to run over years, not months. Regulatory and operational complexity takes time to understand. Trust takes time to build. Short engagements produce deliverables; long ones produce infrastructure.
- Writing as deliverable. Structured writing (briefs, decision records, annotated specs) as a design output alongside interface work. Writing disciplines thinking and leaves a record that survives team turnover.
- Operational signals not consumer metrics. Conversion rates and NPS scores measure the surface. In financial services, the signals that matter are operational. Error rates, exception volumes, support escalation patterns, compliance breach rates. Those are the things worth designing towards.
- AI as leverage. Using AI tooling to extend what is possible without adding headcount. Generating spec variants, exploring interaction patterns at volume, accelerating the handoff between design and engineering. Applied selectively, not as a default process.