Badoo

As Lead Product Designer my key responsibilities include:

Strategising and executing on top priority features and updates from leadership level across multiple business units (Badoo, Bumble, Revenue, and Platforms)
Solving on priority design problems in the six pillars, with a focus on Core Discovery features within the apps.
Leading the North Star project, aligned with new product metrics to deliver revolutionary new features for 2025.
Taking responsibility for the overall design quality of the product.
Aligning design decisions across all product teams (not just vertically within pods)
Providing mentorship to designers across their Collective to help them develop and work towards their OKRs.
Influencing and leading on relationships cross-functionally (beyond just core product teams) with Brand/Creative, Marketing, BI, Research, Safety/Security, Content Design
Continually taking initiative to understand opportunities for improved ways of working (DesignOps) and leading delivery of improvements.
Improving accessibility throughout several design teams.

Alongside my involvement in all the Product design feature work in the four teams, I have also had a focus on multiple initiatives and improvements to the design process, that have also been adopted throughout the entire design team.
Below you will find a few examples of these:

Double Diamond Design Process

Design Problem: When I joined the team, there was no real design process being followed by the product team. This meant that designers were not working efficiently with product managers or engineers, and there was very much a "top down approach" for developing new features.
This meant that research and data were also not being being used effectively to influence the roadmap of work, and product and content designers were not involved at all in any planning.

What did we do? Alongside the Head of Product Design and collaborating cross functionally with the Product Director, Product Managers, Research and BI teams, Engineering Director and Engineering managers, we developed a design process, based off the double diamond design process, but tailored to suit our needs.
We successfully implemented the design process and improved the ways of working to ensure the right people / teams were involved at the right time, and are now taking a user centered approach to prioritising and developing new features and products.

Designers Workshop Toolkit

Design Problem: We noticed that we didn’t have a consistent Discovery process for the designers on how to start a new project or what steps to follow and how.

What did we do? With a smaller working group within the design team, we ran a workshop to gather more information on the Discovery process across the teams, and to ideate on ways to improve it.

Our Findings: One opportunity we identified was the need for more guidance on workshops, including advice on what kinds of workshop the team should be running, who should be involved and improving communication around them.

Solution: We created a base level of workshop templates with full guidance for the team to start using. Not only have the templates been created using modular components that designers can copy and paste to create their own customised workshops for their needs, we have also provided guidance on how to set up the workshop, what literature to prepare before and after the workshop, when in the process should designers be performing the workshop and in what order.

Design Guidelines

Design Problem: There was already a strong UI design system in place when I joined, however, there were no guidelines for designers to use the design system effectively. Components were being misused, accessibility requirements were largely ignored, and new components were being created due to existing components not being flexible enough.

What next? With a brand redesign in 2021, it was my task to translate the new brand into the product, which meant a redesign of all components and screens within the app. I made sure to follow WCAG 2.2 requirements with a goal to reach AA Accessibility in the app.

I took this opportunity to write guidelines for every single component within the app, collaborating with a Content Designer to bring the guidelines to life.
With the new Guidelines, I also incorporated Accessibility references and education at every opportunity, to highlight which WCAG guidelines were being met, and why they were important.

Blueprint

Design Problem: When joining the team, we had just started using Figma as our main design tool. This meant that a lot of the old designs were in Sketch files hidden in decades old Dropbox folders this meant that the designers did not have a single source of truth to reference, or "control" screens to begin designing from. It also meant that we were building a lot of screens from scratch, each and every time we started on a new project because we simply didn't have the correct screens to work from.

The solution: The blueprint is a Figma file which represents what is live on the app in cohesive user flows. It is our single source of truth.

Other benefits include:

Holistic view of the entire app journey, content and components
Increase the speed at which we design new flows and experiments
Design ready pages, with components linked to Cosmos
A detailed view of our custom components in the app
Marketing ready screens, with up to date content and approved imagery
Self-serve for all teams to take what they need