As Head of Product Design I built the design organisation, established a tokenised cross-brand design system and steered the team through two mergers.
I joined a maker of isolated security products as Head of Product Design and left a group that had grown together out of three companies. In between: building a design system, an organisation and a design strategy.
The system. It started with an inventory of the existing design assets, and from there the approach for a technically viable system. Because every designer was tied up in ongoing projects, day-to-day work and system building ran in parallel work streams.
In the end every product ran on the system: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android native and React Native, plus the product web services. Only the marketing website stayed outside.
The organisation. Full line-management responsibility, a flat structure, no layer in between. Resource planning with the unit leads as equals, design strategy directly with the CTO.
I spun UX research out of my own area and set it up as an independent function, as a peer rather than a report. Alongside that: development plans, coaching and three promotions.
A design system that depends on one person is not a system. As a rule I was the extra workbench, not the bottleneck.
This rested on a federated contribution model: designers took on responsibility for individual components in a dual role, with a quality gate run closely with engineering. Early on many worked around the system, finding it slow and restrictive. Technical maturity flipped that: once component parity with engineering was reached, the system became the faster route and the question resolved itself.
In parallel I consolidated design tooling, replacing InVision and Sketch with Figma, adding Frontify as the documentation platform and Storybook for component parity, each backed by a business case taken to board level. After the merger, Frontify was adopted group-wide and scaled up for Gen Digital.
When companies are merged, technology comes first: engines, platforms and infrastructure have to grow together before product work can build on them again. That occupies an entire organisation for years, and in that order it is the right call. For product design it means something else, though: fully validated concepts wait. Next Design had been tested and was convincing internally, but no implementation window was in sight. Once that was clear, I placed most of my team into new roles through the design leads of other units, and moved on myself.
Turning siloed security products into a tokenised, cross-brand system, one that redefined the pace, standing and strategy of product design.
The white-label proof point: a launch-ready Norton macOS app built on Avira's tokenised stack.
A new, validated design strategy for Avira's products, made possible by the efficiency of the tokenised system.
One product family across four platforms, platform-native yet brand-coherent, on a single system.