Leadership has never meant getting further away from designing.
I've spent more than 20 years in Product and UX Design, moving from hands-on design into design leadership while staying close to the product itself.
I enjoy developing designers and creating the conditions for good work, but I also still like getting into a difficult workflow, understanding the constraints and turning an ambiguous problem into something tangible.
At Altus, that meant managing two Product Designers while remaining hands-on across product discovery, interaction design, prototyping and product and experience strategy.
For me, good design leadership moves comfortably between the detail and the bigger picture.
The answer rarely lives on one screen.
Much of my career has been spent on products where individual interactions sit inside larger systems.
At MYOB, I helped lead a four-year transformation of mature desktop accounting software into a browser-based SaaS product spanning around ten delivery teams. At 99designs, I led designers working across shared platform experiences including authentication, checkout and payments. At Altus, I worked on project and portfolio management software shaped by complex workflows, data rules and technical constraints.
Altus for Project is a good example. What looked like an integration with Microsoft Project was really a problem of trust: which system owns the information, what happens when something changes, what are the consequences of an action, and how does someone recover when things go wrong?
That is the kind of design problem I enjoy: behaviour, states, exceptions and systems rather than isolated screens.
Making is getting easier. Judgement isn't.
AI has changed how I work, but not what I think good Product Design requires.
I now use AI across problem understanding, synthesis, exploration, interaction design and coded prototyping. I start with real product context, including documentation, customer evidence, workflows, domain knowledge and constraints, rather than asking AI to invent a solution from a blank prompt.
A recent Altus timesheet concept took me from problem framing to a realistic Microsoft Teams prototype using ChatGPT, Claude Design and Claude Code.
The speed was useful. More important was being able to move almost continuously between understanding the problem, making product decisions, exploring behaviour and evaluating something tangible.
That same shift increasingly brought Design closer to implementation. AI-assisted coded design made it practical to explore interaction behaviour and reusable components directly in code, reducing some of the translation between design intent and Engineering.
For me, coded prototyping isn't about becoming a software engineer. It is another design material: a way to learn earlier and have better conversations about what should actually be built.
The tools will change. The judgement underneath them matters more.
I like building capable design teams.
I like making complicated products easier to understand.
And I still like making things.