A few years ago my job was building Blueberry's brand from the ground up. Today it's leading the product function that shapes how tens of thousands of traders experience it. Looking back, the throughline makes more sense than it probably did at the time.
I joined as Head of Product Design and Creative, and the brief was essentially to give this business an identity worth trusting. In financial services, brand isn't decoration, it's the first signal a prospective client gets about whether you're serious about their money. So I built the creative team from scratch, hiring for craft and judgement rather than just output, and gave Blueberry a visual language it didn't yet have. That became a complete rebrand, alongside a design masterplan for how the brand behaves everywhere from the trading platform to marketing to internal comms, and a master asset library that's still the backbone of how Blueberry looks and feels today. Part of that system had to work across a genuinely global client base, so I led multilingual and right to left localisation, including an Arabic interface built in collaboration with a native Arabic speaking designer, alongside Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Bahasa, Italian and Spanish.
Somewhere in the middle of that process, the conversation started shifting from how things looked to how things worked. Brand and creative had opened the door to a bigger question about the product itself, the onboarding flows, the friction points, the experience end to end. That's how I ended up moving into product, and eventually into the Head of Product role I'm in now.
These days I lead four squads, Acquire, Engage, Operate and Transact, covering everything from how new clients find and fund their accounts through to how they trade, stay with us, and move money in and out. My closest personal focus is on Transact, designing money movement across multiple PSPs and currencies, fiat and crypto, via payment orchestration through Praxis, and Blueberry Partners, our analytics and reconciliation product for introducing brokers. I sit on the exec leadership team and report directly to our CEO, so product is tied straight into commercial strategy rather than operating off to the side.
What I've come to appreciate is how much the design and creative years shaped the way I approach product now. Good product work is still about clarity, coherence and trust, the same things a rebrand is built on, just expressed through onboarding flows and money movement instead of a logo and a colour palette. Most product leaders haven't spent years owning the brand, and most creative leaders haven't spent years owning the roadmap. Having done both means I rarely see them as separate problems.
Core focus: product design leadership, payment orchestration, design systems, UX and interaction design, data informed design.