Leadership
​I believe my greatest responsibility as a leader is to trust and empower my team, creating a culture where they can do their best work effectively, efficiently and confidently. My primary role is to provide strategic direction and design guidance, remove any obstacles that might stand in their way, and support each team member in their individual growth and development.
But, of course, a design leader's job doesn't end with leading their team. It's about advocating for design to a much broader audience. Within the wider business, I'm passionate about bringing the power of customer-centric thinking into everyone's day to day work. I believe it's crucial to not only demonstrate the value and impact of design to the executive team, but to all members of the business. For design to truly succeed, it must be accessible, transparent and understood by all.
Current intiatives
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Working to increase our level of research maturity by expanding the reach of research insights into the business. As an example, we have created a selection of personas that are applicable to people no matter their role, and have created a ChatGPT project that allows people to 'talk' to their users. Of course, this in no way replaces the need for primary research! But it does allow a member of the Support team, for example, to customise a message to a customer based on their persona, and a member of the Marketing team to sense check some value proposition messaging. We are now in the process of training an AI agent using the personas, as well as increasing the library of personas we have. Two members of my team recently won a PEXA Award for Innovation for this work.
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Accessibility has long been a focus of product development at PEXA, and we have over the last year taken this much further. By encouraging and supporting a member of my team, we have been able to overhaul our design and development processes to better enable us to meet WCAG AA criteria. We have also written a white paper on accessibility together (you can see the first few pages of this below - I have had to make this more generic and remove any PEXA-specific guidance, but it should give you the gist!)
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I have successfully procured Dovetail, our first ever research repository, and we are in the process of onboarding.
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I have restructured the design team to reduce knowledge loss risk. We previously had designers who worked solely on one aspect of the business - now they all work across the full product suite. The team is also expanding, with recruitment underway for two new designers, and I am in the process of establishing a career framework for designers in the business.
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I am running more and more service design workshops, and it is quickly becoming established as an accepted way of working.
