• Promoted to Design Systems & Operations lead after 2 years at Smartling.

• Leading Design System squad dedicated to a new design language creation.

• Acted as the primary point of contact and subject matter expert for the design system, supporting and guidance to product designers and engineers.

• Fostered a culture of systematic thinking and reuse, mentoring team members on best practices for component-based design.

• Partnered with Product, Engineering, and Brand leadership to ensure the design system met the evolving needs of the business.

• Led the end-to-end lifecycle of components & patterns, from initial concept and design to development, testing, and release.

• Ensured all components met stringent accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA) and were built with semantic HTML and CSS.

• Created and maintained robust documentation for designers and developers, covering component usage, accessibility guidelines, and brand principles.

• Managed the DS backlog, prioritising new components and improvements based on user research and organisational needs.

• Championed and introduced AI-driven design methodologies to the organisation, utilising a modern AI tool chain (Figma MCP Server, Cursor, Lovable) and generative AI (Claude, ChatGPT , Gemini) to rapidly build and iterate on interactive, WCAG-compliant prototypes.

• Developed and launched a custom Large Language Model (LLM) for the design system, trained on our comprehensive documentation. This provided users with a conversational interface to ask natural language questions and receive instant, accurate answers, significantly improving the discoverability of information and reducing support overhead.

• Empowered product designers across the organisation by establishing a multi-faceted mentorship program. This included implementing formal Design QA sessions, introducing detailed "Accessibility Notes" into design files, and creating a library of video tutorials on how to effectively use DS components and patterns.

• Architected and fixed existing component library in Figma, which accelerated the design prototyping process by an estimated 40% and improved design-to-dev handoff consistency. Reduction from 780 components to 92.

• Conducted a comprehensive UI audit across 4 products, inventorying hundreds of existing components and patterns to identify opportunities for consolidation and standardisation.

• Analysed and documented widespread CSS inconsistencies and visual design debt across the platform, creating a data-informed backlog to prioritise the design system roadmap.

• Defined and implemented a robust component naming convention and taxonomy, which created a shared language and significantly improved communication and alignment between design and engineering teams.

• Evangelised the design system's value across the organisation through presentations, workshops, and office hours, leading to a 20% increase in adoption over 12 months.

• Chaired the Design System Guild/Council, facilitating decision-making on new patterns, component deprecation, and breaking changes.

• Spearheaded the creation of a "trial system," a high-fidelity rebuild of a core product feature using the new design system, to create a compelling, data-driven business case for increased investment in platform modernisation.

• Lead Product Designer on "Engagement" Platform Squad user journey, from improvements of existing features to new journeys/flows - Creating scenarios, user stories, journey flows, prototypes, wireframes.

• Integration, development and supervision of Design thinking processes in the organisation such as Design Sprints, Design Critique sessions, Pair Designing and Design QA (together with devs)

• Developing the UX team's design operations process and resource toolkit - I've integrated Figma in the organisation, transitioning from Sketch, Invision and Zeppelin.

• Cross platform design (Desktop, tablet, mobile web). Working closely with the product and engineering teams to create, plan and execute new features for the platform.

• Improving user journeys by analyzing problems (problem framing frameworks) user pain points, struggles and happy moments.

• Observation (session recordings), competitors analysis, UX Interviews (internal and external users), analyse analytics data, heat maps, collaborating with UX Researcher.

• Development of experiments (based on hypotheses testing model) in partnership with Product Managers.

• Ownership of the design system creation and maintenance, based on the company’s brand values and vision - Figma components and variants, documentation on Confluence and ZeroHeight, Frontend integration support on Storybook.

• Mentoring and coaching other designers (development of career plans, skills to learn and improve, plan of actions).

• Facilitate UX workshops both internally and with clients, bringing people from all areas of businesses together to collaborate.