Design and product leadership from Aotearoa New Zealand

For two decades I’ve been researching, designing, building, and scaling award-winning digital products and services that millions of people around the globe use everyday. I’ve held roles as a designer, creative director, head of design and chief product officer. I’ve led small and large teams at digital agencies, start-ups, and large companies including Amazon, Xero and Starboard.

I believe great software and strong culture comes from collaborative and empathetic multidisciplinary teams who are close to both customer challenges and business opportunities.

Outside work I’m often found slowly suffering up hills on my bike to explore the world, or train for an ultra-endurance bikepacking race.

Starboard
2019 — 2024

Starboard is world leading maritime domain awareness software.
It helps governments and organisations reduce illegal fishing and transnational crime, and protect offshore assets.

It’s a sophisticated geospatial platform that elegantly combines 30+ data sources and ~4,500 streaming data points a second.

As Chief Product Officer I’ve been growing the company over the last 5 years. We have an incredible team with a close-knit and productive culture that frequently ships software customers love and use every day.

Wayward Riders
2019 — Present

In a side step from digital product design, I created a physical product. It’s for holding gear onto your seat during multi-day mountain biking adventures. It's what is holding the bags to seats in the photos below.

Those who live and breath such products have rated it highly. More can be seen at waywardriders.com.

Cycling
2016 — 2019

I was fortunate enough to take a break from work and explore some of the world’s great mountain ranges on bicycle and foot. Mountains, bicycles, new places and new people are dear to my heart, to put it mildly. Photos of mountains, like this one from Peru in 2016, can be seen on instagram.com.

Xero
2013 — 2016

Xero builds Beautiful Business Software for millions of small businesses around the world.

As Head of Design I led a team of product designers, user researchers and content experts. I worked on product strategy, growing teams, improving team collaboration and product features.

Notable work included helping build a user research team to better understand what problems to tackle for whom, and a pattern library team to improve application usability, interface speed, consistency and appearance. I also helped teams ship features customers loved, from invoice reminders to mobile app improvements to Xero projects.

This brief article talks about how the product design team worked, and the principles we followed.

The following screenshots show some of the pattern library, new ideas, and mobile work produced by the product design team during that time.

More work history can be found on LinkedIn. I'm happy to jump on a call and discuss more product and design work and how I approach building software and software teams.