From neuroscience to product design

I started out in neuroscience. Somewhere in the degree I realised the research path was slower and further from real people than I wanted my work to be. I wanted to see what I made reach someone.

I found that reach somewhere unexpected. I spent four years in customer service and operations at Commonwealth Bank, first on the phones, then supervising and leading a remediation team through the operational chaos of COVID. Relaying a customer's problem was never enough for me. I wanted to fix the thing causing it, so I started building. The clearest example was an internal tool that tracked where my team's knowledge was breaking down, so training could go where it was needed. I shaped it with the people using it, and it spread to teams well beyond my own.

A developer I worked with saw the pattern before I did. The customer instincts I kept acting on, and the tools I kept building to act on them, were UX work. He told me to look at design properly. He was right, and I retrained.

Five years on, I've designed across enterprise and startups: complex compliance and enterprise tooling at Atlassian, a multi-year treasury transformation and the accessibility and design-system practice at Macquarie, fintech at Pearler, and most recently three energy-retail products as the sole designer at an early-stage startup.