I've been the founding or early product design hire at five companies over the past ten years: CareMonitor, EngineRoom, Reejig, n0de, and now TeamHiiv, usually before there was a scoped product to design for.
Many genuinely different kinds of complexity so far: healthcare data, business analytics, workforce intelligence, and sustainability data, with agentic AI now the fifth.
Case Studies
n0de
Turning two founders' heads into a repeatable product
n0de held deep expertise in Net Zero transition and no product yet. We made a bet that businesses needed a Net Zero Action Plan specific enough to their own numbers so the next move was easy to take. What we didn't have was a process for getting there, or any evidence the format would actually work on a real business rather than in theory.
So, we recruited and ran research across five early-adopter small businesses, a campaign we named "5 and 5."
Reejig
Fixing search so recruiters could hire and promote the best talent
Search sat at the centre of how customers used Reejig, and it wasn't working. There was no documentation for how the existing solution behaved, no research or strategy behind it, and support tickets kept landing on the same handful of problems. One line from a user summed up the state of it: "Also the fact that I have to type in San Francisco into Reejig drives me nuts. I didn't even know there was another one and that's like the worst word to type."
So I built the reserach, discovery and experimentation we needed to overhaul it.
EngineRoom
Building business reporting depth SME’s could profit from
Planning was meant to be a staple of what made EngineRoom different: business reporting depth most SMEs never get access to. In practice, Advisors avoided it. Most either built a plan for their client in Excel by hand or skipped planning altogether, which is the exact opposite of the platform's core promise.
So I went deep to extract knowledge, understanding, and capability to lead our team not only make plans easy, usable and nice to look at, but to also layer in new functionality that we initially thought wasn’t possible.