Product design and leadership for orgs making a difference.

Zero-to-one projects, design systems, accessibility, growing design teams, and solving gnarly problems.

Recent work

About

I’m a multiple-hat-wearing, purpose-driven design lead with 14+ years of experience working in B2B SaaS, enterprise and B2C contexts in logistics, education, consumer finance and energy.

I believe that good design is a non-hierarchical, multi-disciplinary team sport, and successful teams win by raising each other up.

My design stack includes a lot of Figma, Miro, Obsidian for writing, and ChatGPT for moving faster.

Outside of work, I'm passionate about running, great coffee, and old book smells. I'm currently teaching myself how to play chess properly, how to prompt in Midjourney, and am also informally developing some coaching skills targeting early career designers and technologists.

Say hi via email or find me on LinkedIn.

Colleague reviews

"Mike's blend of leadership, design expertise, and genuine care for his colleagues made a lasting impact on both the team and the products we created. I have no doubt that any team would greatly benefit from his talent and leadership."

— Hua Zhang, Lead Service Designer

"Mike is a talented designer and thoughtful leader. His expertise in all aspects of design from research, to UX and UI was extremely valuable to have within our product team. Additionally, Mike is an absolute pleasure to work with and would be an asset to any company."

— Pat Potestas, Senior Product Manager

Career journey

• '24 Departed Piclo after a wonderful four-year tenure to reset again.
• '22 Promoted to Lead Designer at Piclo with an expanded remit covering design systems, accessibility and zero-to-one products.
• '20 Joined Piclo as a Product Designer, advocating for and practicing human-centered design in the energy sector.
• '19 Embarked on a planned career break in April to take-stock, re-energise, and figure some things out #askmeanything.
• '17 Segue to Product team at TotallyMoney, contributing end-to-end, from user research through to visual design and front-end development.
• '15 Moved to Marketing team at TotallyMoney, designing and managing workflows across all channels, from content and email, through to social media and print.
• '13 Joined Brand team at TotallyMoney as a Senior Designer in a generalist role.
• '09 Cut my teeth working agency-side for Metaphors, a boutique brand agency in leafy Holland park.
• '08 Arrived in London as a self-employed designer-for-hire. Slept on many couches.
• '08 Completed MA Digital Art & Technology from i-DAT.
• '07Adventuring in New Zealand for a time. Made some more friends.
• '06 Got lost in Azeroth for a time. Made some friends.
• '05 Completed BA (Hons) Graphic Design from AUB. Created all the animations and graphics for the end-of-year show.
• '03 Paid summer internship creating 3D animations for POS display advertising, architectural walkthroughs.
• '02 Completed ND Art & Design at PCA. Secured my first paid creative job taking portrait photos of a local author for an upcoming book.
• '00 Received cease and desist from The Bitmap Brothers for Quake 3 mod "Speedball Arena".
• '97 Spent an entire summer designing levels for the various video games when I should have really been outside.
• '89 Wrote some code to make a white blob move across the screen on a Commodore 64 (Dad helped).