For more than fifteen years I've worked where brand and product meet. A brand is a promise and the product is where that promise gets kept, so I have always shaped the two together: the story people hear, the interface they use, and the team that carries both from the first brief to launch.
Today I'm Director of Brand & Product at Digital Streetz, a studio of 30+ people where I direct new products from the first brief to launch, many of them built around AI and automation: an insurance site whose answers come from the broker's own documents, and Redação, a newsroom tool that cut the time to produce an article from hours to under an hour. Some of the work I value most never reaches a customer's screen at all: internal tools and dashboards that let colleagues ship features with improved workflows and aids producing content faster.
AI is also part of how I work, as a second mind beside me rather than in my place. It lets me brainstorm quickly, exploring ideas, concepts, product directions and code in minutes, with Claude Code, opencode and Cline (or other harnesses), Claude Design and Google Stitch, local models through Ollama, vLLM and llama.cpp, and ComfyUI for image and video pipelines. The decisions and the checks stay with me and the team.
Before that I spent eight years leading design at 32Red. I joined as Head of UX, reporting to the CEO, CFO and CTO, and after Kindred Group bought the company in 2017 I ran an autonomous design team across six countries. I hired eleven people, and all eleven grew into mid or senior roles. Across all of it I have led as a player-coach, close enough to design and build when that unblocks the team, and far enough back to let the team lead when it is stronger.
The same four principles hold whether I am directing new products at a studio or running a team inside a listed group.
Because the product is where a brand's promise gets kept, I set one direction that marketing, design and product can all work from, and I write it down so it survives handovers and new hires.
I use AI and automation to take the gathering, copying, structuring and resizing off people's plates, so their time goes into doing what really matters. AI is a sidekick for kicking off fast ideation processes and brainstorming; the decisions and the checks always stay with the team.
I hire for range, run critiques, 1:1's and retros that teach rather than judge, and give designers real problems to own. By empowering them, I've helped create a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.
I judge the work by what it changes, such as an article that takes under an hour instead of several, a shorter time to market or a support call that never has to happen, rather than by the number of screens shipped. After launch, the data informs us and helps deciding what we change next.
Brands I've built for
