I’m a product design and research leader with almost two decades of experience.
As the first designer in several organisations, I’ve built design and research capabilities from the ground up in diverse settings—a large corporate, a growing digital agency, and fast-paced start-ups.
While primarily focused on design and research, my my roles have often extended into adjacent areas like Product Management, Content Strategy, and Data Strategy, enabling me to deliver solutions that bridge disciplines.
I’m a hands-on leader who loves:
- building teams & processes,
- creating design strategies,
- conducting research,
- and crafting impactful design solutions.
I thrive on solving complex problems through design thinking.
Ready to learn more? Explore my work below or check out my thoughts on design and leadership.
Experience
Resource Guru
Joined a small but growing team as their Lead Product Designer in a player / coach role. Established new design processes, helped improve speed of delivery and shipped key features for the organisation.
Snowplow
Joined as the first Product Designer. Established design and research practices within Product and the wider organisation. Grew the design and research team.
Deeson
Established the research and user experience discipline within the agency; grew the value of design and research projects; hired, coached and developed a team of six.
Smiths Medical
I joined as User Experience Specialist and in my three and a half years helped deliver results by encouraging the digital team and the product management team to operate with a more customer-focused mindset.
Nice things people have said
I’ve had the great fortune to work with some amazing, thoughtful people in my career and these are some of the lovely comments they’ve shared with me as feedback:
Nothing is impossible, seriously. I haven’t worked with anyone with such a solutions focused mindset . From people leadership through to what we do as a business, he’s always looking for ways to do things better .
Mike is the best designer I’ve ever worked with. He listens to engineers and offers pragmatic solutions . He leads meetings keeping them efficient but also engaging and fun. It is rare to find people with such excellent technical and interpersonal skills .
Mike is the living example of how Design Thinking can make an impact in an organisation . He has set really strong foundations for the team, establishing and continuously developing our design system, research tools and extremely well thought out processes.
Mike has a skill for freeing his staff to take ownership. He gently encourages people to explore, take risks and express their talent . He personally helped me get out of a rut of imposter syndrome and gave me more confidence and motivatation.
Mike is always considerate of other departments and how actions might affect people in other teams, and it’s so second nature to him that he probably doesn’t appreciate how amazing that is. He is, without a doubt, the person who has empowered me most since he joined the team.