How I work,
told as a story.
six principles, four stories, and the Delivery Hero years as the example
Day one. A new org. Seven hundred new faces.New market, new politics, new problems. Zero context.
Every instinct says: arrive with answers.Prove yourself. Ship something. Make a mark, fast.
First, I listen.
Absorb everything. Conclude nothing.
Weeks of 1:1s, design reviews, steercos and C-level rooms, mostly spent observing. Then the problem statements start writing themselves. I prioritise with my own view, pressure-test it against my manager's, and out fall the first three wins.
1:1s · design reviews · steercos · c-level rooms · support tickets · dashboards
Broad on purpose. Deep by choice.
The T-shape rule. Wide enough to understand every problem space that matters. Then ruthless about what drops, so the select few get everything I have. Focus is a subtraction exercise.
When we rebuilt our ways of working, I didn't open with process. I opened with a story.
December 1911. Two teams race for the South Pole.Amundsen's Norwegians against Scott's British expedition. Same continent, same goal, opposite philosophies.
Scott pushes hard on clear days, shelters on bad ones.Huge miles when the weather allows, nothing when it doesn't. Progress hostage to conditions and mood.
Amundsen walks the same distance every day, blizzard or blue sky.Never too little on hard days, never too much on easy ones. Discipline as strategy.
The team with the plan comes home.
Amundsen reached the pole first and brought every single man back. Scott's party never made it home.A plan, a cadence, and the discipline to see it through.
Amundsen gave our new chapter its spine. Culture, processes, quality bar, and workflows people follow because they believe the plan takes them somewhere better, not because they have to.
When Pandora's 2024 vision needed a centre, I didn't go looking for slides. I went looking for voices.
Support calls. Research sessions. My own conversations with customers.The places where the product succeeds or fails in someone's actual day. Not metrics, moments.
A customer whose dinner never came.Her evening, and her trust, gone in a single push notification.
A vendor whose tablet froze in the lunch rush.Twenty orders on hold and a kitchen at full boil.
A rider counting orders in the rain.Every delivery a small decision about time, safety and pay.
Who are we building this for?
Their words, verbatim, went in front of the whole org.Their words did what no deck could.
Not personas. Not decks. Real stories, pulled from support tickets, UX research and my own customer conversations, then told back to the org until everyone remembered exactly who we build for and why it matters. Words matter, so use them.
When I needed the team to stop playing it safe, I didn't quote a framework. I showed them an experiment.
1994. Komar and Melamid survey the world on its most wanted painting.Thousands of people across a dozen countries, asked exactly what they'd love to see on a canvas.
The answers, everywhere: blue, a landscape, water, wildlife, a famous figure.So the artists painted each country's wish, faithfully, one by one.
Country after country, the same painting.Alex Murrell would later name the era it predicted: the age of average.
Please everyone, and everything turns average.
Average is a choice. We declined.
Proof in hand, I pulled the team out of the OKR grind with one question:
What if Disney designed a food delivery app?
No tickets, no roadmap. Creativity, wonder and magic, pointed at our own product with a novel set of eyes.
That was the ceiling. Then we raised the floor.
New pace, new ways of working, and UX debt quietly compounding underneath. So quality became a program, not a complaint. UX Quality, in three moves:
Audit the debt
Every issue to date documented in one tracker, owned and paid down by its product team.
Fix the foundations
Bento, our design system, adopted by every team as the springboard for quality. Target 100%. Achieved 100%.
Stop the inflow
Design QA revamped, UX bug SLAs in place, and AI putting designers' quick fixes straight into production.
Ready before it's a priority.
Design owned the discovery track, chartering problems and solutions ahead of the ask. When leadership finally said now, the work was already waiting.
Price communication system ↗
Clarity on every fee, before regulators or leadership asked for it.
↳Pandora PRO ↗
The subscription rethink, concepted and validated ahead of its moment.
↳Order tracking page revamp ↗
The most viewed screen in the product, reimagined before it was on any roadmap.
When AI became the conversation, and the anxiety, I didn't bring the team a policy. I brought them a lap record.
Monaco, 1988. Qualifying.The tightest circuit in Formula 1, where the walls punish every mistake.
Two world champions. The same car.Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, teammates in identical McLarens.
Senna goes 1.4 seconds faster.In a sport measured in thousandths, on equal machinery, that gap shouldn't exist.
The car had limits.
His judgment didn't.
AI is our era's machine.
I push the team to upskill, tinker, and put it to work where it compounds, while protecting what Senna proved: the edge lives in human judgment. We wrote our own manifesto rather than wait for one.
Foundations first. Then flight.
Spark started itself. Self-initiated, self-funded, a team inspired into making time rather than mandated to. The step after quality is uplift, and it's still unfolding.
You just watched all six at work.
First principles
The map before the moves. Get the problem right, then craft the solution.
Dive deep
Same miles every day. Hands-on wherever the moment asks.
Storytelling
Words that made seven hundred people care. Words matter, so use them.
Responsible AI
The machine, driven. Fluency everywhere, judgment surrendered nowhere.
Craft with impact
The floor raised to one hundred percent, and pointed at real outcomes.
Empower future thinking
Disney, deer, and thirty concepts the roadmap still mines today.
Exceptional products are built by people who are inspired by where they're going, push each other to be better, and never lose sight of what great looks like.