Agency Leadership 2012-19

In  2012 I took on the UX team leadership of Bristol agency Nomensa. They had talented people, a commitment to accessibility and a slightly dry academic proposition. Over the 20 months of my tenure I introduced new collaborative, contemporary ways of working and made the proposition more progressive, introducing new clients such as Microsoft MixRadio. I grew the team and employed great people, some of whom now head-up Design in other Bristol agencies and organisations. 

I joined Bristol agency cxpartners in 2014 to take a break from running a large UX team and get back into a strategy/delivery role. cxpartners had grown organically on a reputation of insightful, high quality work and as a UX Director I won and directed projects for clients such as Stagecoach, SACO and Experian.

I believe to succeed in an increasingly crowded market it is necessary to specialise in a specific category and have something useful to say about it. To this end I built a financial services client-base that consolidated existing clients such as Invesco-Perpetual, Triodos Bank and Barclays and won new ones such as BlueBay Asset Management, the Co-operative Bank  and the Nationwide Building Society. The NBS asked us to establish a functioning ’off the shelf’ design agency within the society. A commercially valuable but complicated win that delivered tough lessons.

I needed a team who could speak and deliver credibly, scale and ‘be available’.  We developed a sector-specific model which would enable specialism and encourage entrepreneurial behaviour - something important to me. The company adopted the model and the Financial Services team was established and grew from 6 to over 20 in two years.
 
We went to market with customer-led innovation; a point of view on the change taking place in the FS sector and a real understanding of the regulatory environment - and of course an excellent design practice.

Central to our work in FS was to ensure good and fair outcomes for people. My background and training made me determined that our FS practice would  be about so much more than just money. We worked in health care and health insurance, mapping out patient treatment pathways and developing smart health care assistive prototypes and harnessed mobile technologies to deliver remote diagnosis and consultation. I recognised that Data was the future of meaningful, useful, personalised experiences and brought this to the centre of our vision. We won work in the emerging Personal Information Economy space as well as working on other data driven innovations.  We designed for simplification and clarity to ensure all customers could understand complex information across diverse populations and we worked openly and candidly with our clients who respected and shared our points of view.
 
We won the Team of the Year award at the Financial Services User Experience Awards in 2016 and evangelised the forthcoming PSD2/Open Banking initiative before most had heard of it, showing how it would play out and where the opportunities would lie (see my point of view at the time). We understood where the unbundling disruption in banking was going (see my point of view at the time) and were at the edge of the breaking wave of disruption in the Insurance sector and also helped our clients navigate the changes demanded by the Insurance Distribution Directive.    
We developed a successful integrated marketing and business strategy in which we published valuable content reporting the most recent trends in the sector and evidenced this with prototypes of product concepts demonstrating client opportunities.

The strategy was successful and delivered the company’s first £1m clients. Our new clients included Cigna, Co-op Bank, Zurich Life, Hargreaves-Lansdown, Giffgaff, RAC, London and Country and  VISA. Our reputation and record of achievement led us to win business in North America, where we worked with insurer All State on date-driven product innovations for several years.