Role
Head of Product Design

Company
Readly — global subscription platform for magazines and newspapers

Team
Built the in-house product design team from the ground up to 8 designers, alongside UX Research

Focus
Design leadership, product strategy, discovery and consumer experience

Context

When I joined as Head of Product Design, the product organisation was growing but design was still largely consultant-driven. My mandate was to build a strong in-house design capability, raise the quality of the consumer experience and strengthen design’s role in product development.

As part of the product leadership team, I worked alongside product and engineering leadership to connect design direction, discovery and product strategy.

My role

As Head of Product Design, I combined organisational leadership with hands-on product design.

My responsibilities included:

• Building and leading the in-house product design team

• Representing design in product leadership and shaping product strategy

• Setting product design vision and experience direction

• Developing discovery practices and cross-functional ways of working

• Raising craft quality and strengthening the design system

• Leading selected strategic design initiatives hands-on

Building design capability

One of my first priorities was moving Readly from a consultant-dependent setup towards a strong in-house product design capability.

I built the internal product design team from the ground up to eight designers, working across product teams alongside UX Research.

But scaling the team was only part of the challenge. We also introduced shared practices that helped designers operate as one team while staying close to their respective product areas:

• Design critiques and craft rituals

• Product trios across product, tech and design

• Shared discovery practices

• Clearer ownership across product areas

Together, these changes gave design a stronger voice in product decisions while raising consistency, ownership and craft across teams.

Raising the product design bar

Alongside building the team, I wanted to establish a clearer experience direction and shared quality bar across Readly’s products.

I initiated Design Next Level to bring mobile and web closer together and create a more coherent foundation for the consumer experience.

The focus was:

• improving content discovery and navigation

• aligning visual language across platforms

• strengthening accessibility

• consolidating the design system

This gave designers and product teams a shared direction for improving the experience while creating stronger foundations for future product development.

Introducing Continuous Discovery

To move teams from solution-driven delivery towards stronger product discovery, we developed a shared continuous discovery playbook across the product organisation.

It connected product outcomes and user opportunities with ideation, prototyping and rapid experimentation — helping teams explore and validate ideas before committing to development.

My role was to establish the approach together with product leadership and help embed it into cross-functional ways of working.

Staying close to the craft — evolving the mobile experience

One strategic initiative brought these different parts of my role together. Mobile Fast Track explored how Readly’s mobile experience could evolve beyond replica magazines towards individual articles, better discovery, personalisation and audio.

I worked hands-on on the experience direction, creating a vision prototype that explored how article-based reading, discovery and audio could come together in one mobile experience.

The prototype acted as a north star for product, design and engineering, helping teams align on the direction and break the vision into a sequence of releases.

One of the new capabilities was AI-generated audio, which required us to rethink how content could be discovered and consumed beyond traditional reading. The concept explored how reading and listening could coexist within the same experience.

Impact

Design capability
Built Readly’s in-house product design team from the ground up to eight designers and established shared practices for craft, discovery and collaboration.

Product organisation
Strengthened design’s role in product strategy and established closer collaboration between product, design and engineering.

Consumer experience
Set direction for the next generation of Readly’s mobile experience, including article-based reading, improved discovery, personalisation and audio.