Lead Product Designer, Florence (team of 4 designers + 1 UX researcher) • 2022–2024

The Challenge

In 2022, I joined Florence as Lead Product Designer alongside a Senior Designer into a fragmented library of UI patterns and no design voice. As Florence gradually scaled across UK, France and Canada markets, the groundwork for scalable design ops, team structure and leadership were critical.

With multiple markets to support and expectations shaped by strong competitors, we needed both a stronger team and a more coherent way to design and ship product.

My Role

I reported into the CTO, whilst partnering closely with the CPO and engineering leads. I joined at the same time as a Senior Product Designer and was responsible for growing the team, defining ways of working, and equipping design with the structure and visibility to influence product direction rather than just reflect it.

What I delivered on:

• Hiring a small but impactful team: a mid‑weight designer to own an emerging French market, a UXR to build relationships with clinicians and care staff and return insights back into the organisation, and a junior designer with a strong eye for systems and detail who could wrangle complex component work and still deliver on features.

• Establishing Nightingale, our design system, as one major part of a broader move toward consistency and shared language, including tackling long‑standing design debt in areas like forms and interaction patterns.

• Building design ops foundations: regular critique (Spotlights), clearer intake and prioritisation, and streamlined ways for designers to communicate their work whilst staying close to product and engineering roadmaps.

• Nurturing a collaborative sub-culture, where engineering and product would be seamlessly involved in decisions, from in‑office sessions like our Nightingale font testing labs to regular show‑and‑tell around system decisions.

Impact