My working style?

I advocate that any viable design process must be deeply intertwined with sales activities in order to expose ‘commercial truths’. These truths are the insights that contribute directly to the market success of a product or service and so I employ a combination of minimal-cost prototyping and direct sales activities to assess the viability of a design before investing in development.

Development starts with interpreting any user stories or service workflows to extract entities and form a fundamental data structure. Based on this data structure and the goals of the application, I’ll then choose database technology and corresponding back-end and front-end stacks.

Depending on the level of ambiguity and scope of the design, I may develop mock APIs to power Craft, Sketch and Invision for confirmatory mock-ups before undertaking development. At this stage I may involve a visual designer or UX specialist if high fidelity mock-ups are required. Otherwise, typically barebones wireframes are fast and sufficient.

In my own development and the teams I lead, I emphasise the need to obtain consumer and peer-reviewed feedback as often and as directly as possible. Consequently, I promote developing in work units of absolute minimum functionality required in order to gain meaningful feedback. This ensures that a steady stream of context is available and individual efforts can remain focused on commercial goals.

I’m keenly aware of the dopamine cycle associated with iterative development and helps teams to adopt practices that minimise distractions, build mindfulness for focus, keep lab notes and track their productive time. The goal is holistic wellbeing, which is the single greatest productivity boost and so I set individual goals to 6 productive hours per day. This ensures a balance of meaningful progress and healthy work/life freedom.