Hands-on design leader & strategist
15+ years in design, 6+ years in leadership. Scaled a design team from a 2-person shared service to a 9-person embedded practice. Every key initiative has a measured result.
Selected work
Built from scratch: a new product category, two platforms, three user audiences. 5,000+ live shows. Reached 60M+ viewers in Germany.
Defined four intent types before touching a screen. +4% CTR. +8% satisfaction. −42% engineering maintenance.
Research was the go/no-go gate, not a rubber stamp. ~€100k annual agency costs eliminated. A/B confirmed.
How I lead
The search redesign started with three weeks of intent-type analysis before touching a screen. That constraint eliminated an entire class of design dead-ends and cut the number of concepts needed to test in half.
No line authority over engineering leads, product leads, or agile coaches. I still changed how all digital product teams discover. Earned the director's backing, made the case on each lead's own terms. All three adopted it.
The design system was a joint build: designers owned the UI library, tokens, and rules; front-end engineers built the shared components in Storybook. The challenge was never the build. It was sustaining it. Informal goodwill is not a governance model. I appointed two designers with genuine veto authority over component proposals. Compliance became structural, not dependent on who happened to care that week.
What colleagues say