About me
As a design leader who believes that exceptional products start with exceptional teams, I have dedicated my career to creating environments where designers thrive and deliver their best work.
My leadership philosophy centers on empowering people first: knowing that when designers feel confident and supported, innovation always follows. I’ve cultivated teams where individuals have overcome self-imposed limitations, transforming designers who once approached challenges with anxiety into confident professionals who eagerly tackle complex problems.
This commitment to developing talent extends beyond my corporate work. Through years of teaching at various academies and design schools, I’ve refined my ability to articulate design principles clearly, mentor emerging talent, and adapt my communication to different learning styles—skills that directly enhance my leadership approach.
This experience has deepened my understanding of how to identify potential in designers at all career stages and create personalised growth paths.
Beyond the design team, I’ve established collaborative relationships across multiple directorates, creating direct working partnerships between designers and colleagues in other teams (such as Research, First Nations Directorate, etc.). These connections have helped to broke down traditional silos, enabling faster decision-making and bringing shared vision into every aspect of product development.
I approach design operations as a strategic advantage. What began as tactical improvements—implementing project tracking tools or optimising workflows—has evolved into comprehensive systems that enhance both the quality and speed of our design work. By treating our process itself as a product to be continuously refined, I’ve created sustainable frameworks that scale with our ambitions.
This holistic approach to design leadership, informed by my work as a designer, manager, and educator has become the cornerstone of my professional philosophy.
Becoming a good manager
From Classroom to Design Teams
My years teaching design to career-changers profoundly influenced my leadership approach, instilling principles that continue to define how I develop design teams today.
In the classroom, I worked with individuals at pivotal life moments—professionals unhappy in their current roles or those seeking new beginnings after job loss. This taught me to recognise that behind every professional journey lies a deeply personal story. My priority wasn’t simply imparting technical skills, but helping people succeed holistically in their transition to design careers.
This experience cultivated my ability to identify potential where others might see gaps. I became adept at recognising transferable skills and latent talents in diverse backgrounds — seeing how a former teacher’s communication abilities or a retail manager’s empathy could become design strengths. By highlighting these connections, I helped students reframe their perceived disadvantages into unique perspectives that enriched their design work
Teaching has also taught me to challenge design conventions. By helping students navigate industry “rules” and misconceptions that might have limited their potential, I developed a more nuanced understanding of what truly matters in design practice. This has made me a more thoughtful leader who questions assumed limitations and encourages team members to find their authentic voice rather than conforming to rigid expectations.
The classroom was also a masterclass in attention management. Responding to messages outside class hours, providing individualised feedback, and balancing the needs of many students prepared me for the multifaceted demands of design leadership. After simultaneously guiding 20 individuals through complex career transitions, managing design teams felt like a natural progression rather than a daunting leap.
Most importantly, teaching reinforced that leadership is fundamentally about service—creating conditions for others to succeed, often in ways they hadn’t imagined possible for themselves. This service mindset remains at the core of my leadership approach, whether I’m guiding an individual designer through a challenging project or shaping a team’s collective vision.
The Process
People development
I believe exceptional design emerges when talented individuals are empowered to bring their full creative potential to the table. My approach to developing designers is deeply personalised, focusing on nurturing confidence alongside technical skill—creating leaders, not just executors.
My people development philosophy centers on progressive autonomy through intentional support. When I identify a designer’s unique strengths, I create deliberate opportunities for them to shine while providing the exact level of support they need to succeed. This support evolves over time — what begins as collaborative preparation eventually transitions to light guidance, and ultimately to independent excellence.
This approach manifests most clearly in how I prepare team members for high-stakes situations. Rather than simply delegating presentations or senior stakeholder meetings, I create a confidence-building journey. We might initially co-create the presentation structure and rehearse key talking points together. As their comfort grows with each opportunity, my involvement gradually recedes—from active participant to occasional sounding board, and finally to an encouraging observer.
What makes this approach effective is patience and consistency. Transformation doesn’t happen overnight—it’s built through sustained belief in someone’s potential, strategic stretching of their capabilities, and celebrating each milestone along the way.
The result has been designers who now confidently lead strategic conversations with C-suite executives, researchers who shape product direction rather than simply executing studies, and team members who have discovered leadership capabilities they never knew they possessed.
Building Inclusive Design Partnerships
Cross-Functional Collaboration
My approach to cross-functional collaboration is founded on the belief that meaningful engagement must begin early, continue often, and always be iterated upon. This has been especially evident in transforming how our team collaborates with our First Nations Directorate and Lived Experience teams.
The transformation started with building genuine relationships. Rather than transactional interactions, I created space for my design team and the First Nations team to connect as people first. This foundation of mutual respect enabled honest conversations about historical challenges in our collaboration process.
I then restructured our workflow to integrate First Nations perspectives at inception rather than conclusion. By involving them before designs were finalised, we ensured their cultural knowledge and community insights shaped solutions from the ground up.
This early engagement was complemented by rigorous documentation in our knowledge base, elevating their input from informal feedback to essential design guidance.
The impact extended beyond my direct influence as this approach created a ripple effect throughout our design practice. Design team members independently began prioritising First Nations collaboration, raising potential concerns before they became issues, and naturally integrating cultural considerations into their design thinking.
This collaborative model has yielded tangible benefits: more culturally appropriate products, stronger cross-team relationships, and elimination of costly late-stage redesigns. But its true value lies in establishing a more equitable design process that honours First Nations voices as essential to our success rather than as a compliance checkbox.
This experience exemplifies my broader philosophy on cross-functional collaboration—that the strongest partnerships emerge when we break down historical silos, establish authentic relationships, and recognise that diverse perspectives don’t constrain creativity but rather enhance it.