My role wasn't to design. It was to coach & guide five companies to design better themselves. Each at a different stage, with different teams, and different problems to solve.
While at the Design Age Institute (DAI) I took on one of the most complex leadership challenges of my career. Managing design delivery across five industry-funded companies at once, each building new next-gen mobility and independence products for older adults.
The work that has the most lasting impact isn't any single design output. It's the moment a founder or engineer starts asking different questions, moving from "what should we build?" to "who is this actually for?"
That shift, replicated across five organisations simultaneously, is what made this programme matter beyond its deliverables.
No two companies were at the same stage, had the same design maturity, or faced the same challenges. Many were engineering-led, had never conducted user research, and were unfamiliar with inclusive design practices. They were operating under government funding constraints with clear contractual milestones. And I was managing experienced senior leaders, CEOs, COOs, Heads of Product, who needed coaching, not directing.
My role wasn't to design for them. It was to coach them to design better themselves — while ensuring every project delivered genuine impact for the older adults it was meant to serve.
Within six+ months, design quality improved by 75% across all five projects. Four of the five companies went on to invest further in design beyond the programme.
*Most of this work is under NDA and cannot be shared in public. Below are snapshots of the projects, approach, learnings and outcomes. Please get in touch for more information.
Outcomes & Impact
• 75% increase in design quality across all five projects within six months
• 65% increase in usability scores measured through RCA evaluations
• 4 out of 5 companies increased design investment beyond the programme
• 35+ research insights generated directly from older adult participants
• Design process templates adopted into RCA's reusable toolkit for future programmes
• Influenced national policy discussions on ageing and inclusive design
What I did
• Managed design delivery across five companies simultaneously. Each at a different stage of maturity and with different business models, team skills, and product scopes
• Created design briefs, milestone trackers, and progress reporting frameworks to align stakeholders and monitor delivery across all five
• Facilitated kick-off meetings and weekly check-ins, adapting plans in real time when challenges arose
• Acted as day-to-day design contact and escalation point for senior leaders across all five companies
• Designed and delivered user-centred design training to over 10 organisations and partners
• Mentored senior stakeholders to reframe problems through research insights, turning assumptions into testable hypotheses
• Oversaw 35+ older adult participants across workshops, interviews, and prototype testing
• Scoped and recruited external design specialists to fill capability gaps across teams
• For one company, stepped into an interim Head of Design role, conducting in-depth design reviews and coaching the engineering team directly when the project needed more intensive support
Each project was evaluated and validated through the same underlying methodology:
→Understanding people's needs
→ prototyping
→ testing
→ learning
→ iterating
→ and deciding / repeating.
....Until the final deadline.
Centaur Robotics had been developing a groundbreaking self-balancing two-wheeled electric personal vehicle for older adults for years. To make it genuinely usable, they needed an intuitive human-machine interface that accounted for the cognitive and physical realities of their users, including people with arthritis and limited dexterity.
I guided two full-day user workshops with 20+ older adult participants, testing various combinations of physical prototypes and systematically assessing button typology, iconography, and placement. The insights directly shaped how the interface was designed to give users full steering control regardless of their physical limitations.
The original premise of Briteway by Briteyellow was straightforward: provide intelligent train journey planning and real-time navigation support for older adults using AR and VR. But planning complexity, technology compatibility issues, and strained stakeholder relationships made it anything but.
My most significant contribution here was reframing how the senior team thought about design, shifting them from viewing it as a solution delivery task to understanding it as a process of exploration, empathy, and iteration. That mindset shift unlocked the design quality the product needed. The project secured ten commercial bids with Transport for Wales and is now launching across the UK.
In collaboration with Invisible Creations, our goal was to develop inclusive, attractive, dual-purpose mobility products that helped older adults maintain independence at home, without the stigma that often comes with assistive living products.
I sourced and hired external design support and led a full day of user testing with 12+ older adults using physical prototypes, VR headsets, surveys, and interviews, exploring diverse user journeys in and around the home to identify where the real problems and opportunities lived. The result was a range of garden assistive living solutions that integrated discreetly with plant pots, window boxes, and outdoor lighting. The range is now available at B&Q.
Supersmith wanted to build a revolutionary mobility scooter that addressed the fundamental flaws in all existing scooters, poor stability and limited manoeuvrability. Their solution was distinctive: seating riders at 90% of standing height to overcome the negative social dynamics of low sitting positions, with three wheels for agility and adaptive robotics to navigate slopes, cambers, and uneven pavements.
My focus was coaching the team to marry the product's aesthetics with its values, conveying modernity, durability, and safety, and mentoring them in how to frame and translate user insights into concrete product decisions.
The ambition with Applied Information Group was significant: develop the UK's first national walking and cycling wayfinding system for active travel, one that specifically addressed the needs and aspirations of a diverse ageing population, and was adopted as a standard across numerous councils and governing bodies nationwide.
I guided Applied Information Group through creating the Inclusive Wayfinding Toolkit, a comprehensive framework with chapters on enhancing mobility, socialisation, and access to local services, while ensuring safety, confidence, and a sense of connection for older adults across the UK. This work contributed to national policy discussions on ageing and inclusive design.
Before any project began, a significant amount of time was spent reviewing each company's business, proposition, and product in depth. Understanding the challenges they had already encountered and what their team actually needed.
This formed the foundation for kick-off meetings where we defined achievable milestone deliverables for the six-month programme and put contractual agreements in place.
Many of these companies had never conducted user research. I worked alongside their engineers, developers, psychologists, sales, and manufacturing teams to plan and run user testing workshops, with a consistent focus on avoiding leading questions, steering clear of confirmation bias, and keeping attention on specific areas of the customer journey.
I then supported usability testing analysis and translated findings into design development decisions.
Contextual understanding
VR & physical prototypes' testing
Product feedback & comparison surveys
After each kick-off I gathered relevant books, reports, papers, and resources from the Helen Hamlyn Centre Research Team, providing each company with access to paid research, accessibility compliance standards, specialist equipment, and connections to NICA.
Where team capability gaps existed I scoped, selected, and helped recruit the right external design specialists.
Snapshot of library resources
NICA Centre
I led weekly catch-ups across all five companies tracked milestones, surfaced obstacles early, and kept teams focused on user needs rather than drifting toward feature scope creep or getting lost in technical build complexity. Keeping the end user visible and central throughout was a constant discipline.
Snapshot. Weekly catch-ups cross all 5 companies
Unexpected challenges arose, disagreements with external design experts, projects running out of funds, user research taking longer than planned. Where possible I adjusted milestones and budgets and increased the frequency of check-ins. For one company the challenges were significant enough that I stepped into a larger interim role, acting as Design Advisor and Head of Design, conducting deeper design reviews and coaching the engineering team and stakeholders directly to keep the project on track.
Several companies lacked knowledge of broader business factors, how to fund a route to market, how to develop an effective sales and marketing strategy, how to brief and assess a design agency. I facilitated connections with the right industry experts and guided them through these questions, ensuring design decisions weren't made in isolation from commercial realities.
A few months into the programme I delivered a human centered design training session to over ten organisations and partners, providing practical tools, templates, and frameworks alongside resources for developing action plans.
The aim was to shift the mindset of executives and stakeholders away from operational product delivery and toward building a business vision grounded in meeting real user needs. The session sparked discussions about user-centredness across all ten organisations and helped teams assess their current design maturity honestly, which was itself a foundation for improvement.
You can read a summary of this talk here.
Snapshot of me providing User Centered Design training
Design Maturity Level Framework explained across all teams
80% of this role was influencing stakeholders and helping to reframe their thinking. Managing business owners and senior leaders is fundamentally different from managing individual contributors. I became the person they came to when they were stuck, not to deliver tactical outputs but to help them think through complex situations:
"How do I brief a design agency and assess them?", "How do I spread user-centred thinking across my team?". Bringing focus and clarity to those questions, and knowing when to push and when to step back, was the real work.
I quickly found myself coordinating with more departments than I had team members. Rapport was everything. Without it, conflicting priorities stall progress. With it, even the most resistant engineering team starts asking about user needs.
My value in this role became creating clarity, aligning business objectives, funding requirements, and user needs into a single shared direction that all stakeholders could move toward together.
Managing five companies simultaneously taught me something that a single role rarely does: how to diagnose quickly, adapt constantly, and lead without the safety net of deep familiarity with any one context.
The work that had the most lasting impact wasn't any single design output. It was the moment a founder or engineer started asking different questions, moving from "what should we build?" to "who is this actually for?" That shift, replicated across five organisations, is what made this programme matter beyond its deliverables.
