Leadership & expertise

The fourteen things people usually want to talk to me about.

Each of these has its own page. They're written as articles rather than as a capability list, because a list tells you what I claim and an article lets you judge whether I mean it.

Digital & experience strategy

Most of the strategy work I've done has started with a gap between what a business says it wants and what the experience actually does. Closing that gap has been a large part of my job for the last decade or so.

Customer experience

I've worked on customer experience in travel, scientific publishing, luxury retail and cross-border ecommerce. The industries look very different and the underlying problems have been remarkably similar.

Ecommerce & conversion

I've worked on ecommerce for most of my career, starting with travel booking and moving through luxury retail and cross-border marketplaces. Conversion is the part of the job where the argument is easiest to settle.

Product strategy

I came into product strategy from design rather than from product management, which shaped how I think about it. The questions I find most useful are usually about what a team has agreed to stop doing.

Design leadership

I spent almost a decade at Selfridges taking a UX team of three into a multidisciplinary function of more than twenty. Most of what I learned about leadership came from getting parts of that wrong first.

Customer research

I've spent most of my career trying to get closer to the people we design for, and a fair amount of it trying to get organisations to listen. Research is only useful when it changes what someone decides to do.

Data & insight

I'm not an analyst, and I've stopped pretending otherwise. What I have got better at is knowing which questions data can answer, which ones it can't, and how to tell the difference before a decision gets made on the wrong evidence.

Experimentation & optimisation

Most of the useful things I've learned about digital products came from shipping something, watching it underperform and working out why. Experimentation is the version of that with slightly better bookkeeping.

AI & emerging technology

I'm a design leader who works with AI rather than someone who builds the underlying technology, and I think that distinction is worth making up front. What follows is what I have actually found useful and what I have found overstated.

Digital transformation

Almost every transformation I've been part of was described as a technology programme and turned out to be a question about how people work. The systems were usually the easier half.

Organisational design

Most of the structural problems I've worked on weren't really about the org chart. They were about how decisions travelled, who owned what, and whether the people doing the work had enough context to do it well.

Commercial strategy

For a long time I could contribute to commercial conversations without properly understanding the machinery behind them. Closing that gap changed the kind of work I was able to get funded.

International leadership

Working across markets has taught me that the hardest differences are rarely linguistic. They're usually differences in what people take for granted about how shopping, trust or service is supposed to work.

Coaching & talent development

I've spent a lot of my career trying to build teams where people get better at their craft while they're doing the work. It's slower than hiring for the skill you need, and in my experience it holds up better.

The career history behind all of this is on the Experience page.

Looking for senior digital or experience leadership?

If you're building a team, a product or a customer experience that needs to perform, I'd be glad to talk.

Get in touch View selected work