Product, Design, Leadership, & Consultancy
Current Status: Available for freelance or contract work
I'm a SaaS and web design expert who's skilled at growing, managing and mentoring teams of talented designers, researchers, developers, and QA's.
Currently I'm building Squeaky Analytics alongside various consulting and freelance gigs, but over the years I've lead product and design teams in fintech, health tech, and digital asset management, as well as holding senior roles in a variety of other technology companies.
Quick links: Recommendations | Experience | Education | Skills | Portfolio | Get in touch
Recommendations
Experience
Cofounder at Squeaky
I took 6 months off from regular employment to found and manage Squeaky, which is a privacy-first web analytics suite. From a blank canvas to a fully realised business, I set the vision, strategy and goals for the company, along with researching, designing, validating, project managing, QA'ing every element of Squeaky's web application and website.
Head of Product at Dyme (Ad Interim)
I joined Dyme to help them professionalise their product delivery, introduce a structured and strategic approach to planning and decision making, and find a talented permanent hire for the role. Key achievements included:
- Running strategy and goals workshops to define ambitious and achievable 3 year goals, and the strategic workstreams best suited to help Dyme deliver on their vision for personal finance.
- Updating the agile delivery process with the introduction of formalised sprints, and ritual scrum meetings.
- Proposal and implementation of new project management workflows and tooling. Improvements were adopted for company-wide project management and documentation.
- Simplifying and improving Design -> Developer collaboration by switching from a combination Sketch and Zeplin to Figma.
- Creating and maintaining a 6 month product roadmap aligned with OKRs and strategic workstreams.
- Hiring Dyme's first dedicated QA Engineer to help professionalise the testing process and improve the quality of product delivery.
- Hiring a long term successor to lead Dyme's Product Team for the years ahead.
Product Design Manager at Bynder (Ad Interim)
I worked with Bynder for 6 months in 2021 to help manage their distributed Product Design team, consisting of 7 members across 3 countries. Business and project work aside, the primary focus was on introducing clearer team structure, processes, practices, and support - including, but not limited to:
- Introducing an updated meeting rhythm to increase touch points and collaboration across a team in 2 time zones.
- Providing weekly individual coaching, support and mentorship to the team.
- Defining progression matrices for both Product Design and UX design roles, to help team members understand their current role, as well as where and how they can grow professionally.
- Hiring 2 additional team members, both UX designers to balance out a Product and UI heavy team.
Product Design Manager at Castor
Lead Product Designer at Castor
I joined Castor as Lead Product Designer before building their UX & Design team as Product Design Manager.
The company grey from 10-100 people in my time there, and we went from being EU-grant funded to closing a $45m Series B. It's impossible to cover the breadth of work undertaken, but stand-out projects include: re-designing the flagship EDC product, designing and launching an eConsent platform, updating the marketing website, creating new internal and external brands, achieving a whole host or regulatory/compliance milestones, and having an awesome time bringing medical research technology into the 21st Century.
Senior UX Designer at Deskpro
I joined Deskpro to lead the redesign of their web app, introduce and specify components for a new front-end framework and re-brand the business. As my workload grew I ended up completing over 40 projects and, aside from the aforementioned, other stand-out work included: designing an amazing new android app, designing Deskpro's new VOIP (voice) channel, completely redesigning the instant messenger feature and the email template management UI.
Lead Interaction Designer at Jobsite
My work included a variety of UX, UI and Interaction design projects on the b2b side of Jobsite. Key projects included:
- Redesigning the Jobsite Candidate Search experience.
- Shortening and improving e-commerce journeys.
- Researching, designing and introducing recruiter personas.
- Driving the adoption of a new frontend framework and UI component library to more easily and quickly share code across the recruiter app.
- UX Lead for various innovation projects within the Stepstone.
UI Designer at Crunch
During my time at Crunch I lead a redesign of our marketing website as well as a major visual update to the Crunch web app.
Though nominally working as a UI designer, my remit included UX, Interaction, Visual and Graphic Design work, generating screens flows, sitemaps, and prototypes in high and low fidelity alongside user testing and project refinement.
Lead Designer at Nice Design
Managed the creative direction of all web design and branding projects as well as redeveloping the Nice branding, before returning to freelance.
Freelance Graphic Design
I spent 5 years working a variety of freelance graphic and web design projects whilst completing my degrees, ranging from software systems and websites to branding proposals and graphic design.
Education
MA in Fine Art at The University of Chichester (Distinction)
During my MA I developed timed-installations and sculptures using reclaimed materials and objects. These large scale (up to 10 x 20 metre) installations addressed various socio-political concepts and topics, such as Bradley Manning's Wikileaks Trial, Animal Welfare Management, Environmentalism & the climate crisis.
BA in Architecture at The University of Greenwich (2:1)
Whilst studying architecture at the University of Greenwich I worked on a wide array of projects, such as designing a theatrical retreat that was set within the disused slate quarries of LLanberis, Wales, and a Coffee Shop/Caffeine-Den located in the meat-packing district of Manhattan NY.
Skills
Management, Leadership & People Skills
Design & Research Expertise
Platfrom & Domain Expertise
Good design is domain and platform agnostic, but I'm experienced working in following areas:
Software & Tools Expertise
Portfolio
Below you'll find a small collection of projects that I either have permission to share, or I'm confident are already in the public domain.
Analytics Web App Design for Squeaky
2021 - 2022
B2B Marketing Site Design for Squeaky
2021 - 2022
Design Roles Workshop for Bynder
2021
Pair Designing for Bynder
2021
eConsent Web App for Castor
2020 - 2021
Covid Mobile App for Castor
2020
Careers Website for Castor
2019 - 2020
Community Web App for HackerStash
2020
Helpdesk Web App for Deskpro
2016 - 2017
Brand Design for Deskpro
2016
Recruiter Web App Proposal for Jobsite
2017
Personas for Jobsite
2016
Get in touch
If you'd like to get in touch please use the form below.
Smart, strategic and extremely talented. Chris is, without a doubt, the most gifted designer and design manager I've worked with in my career so far. He's knowledgable and strong in all areas of design - from visual to interaction, and especially so for product/UX. His individual contributions, as well as the work of his team, regularly surpassed expectations. He is also one of those rare managers who every single one of his direct reports liked working with/for them.
Beyond his exemplary performance as a designer and manager, he also stands out as someone who adds tremendous value to a company's culture - from great operational ideas on how to encourage the right behaviours, to being a fun, friendly, and supportive colleague.