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 7 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 was responsible for:

• Building, leading and developing the in-house product design team

• Coaching designers and strengthening design craft and collaboration

• Defining product design vision and experience direction

• Partnering with product and engineering leadership on product strategy

• Establishing stronger discovery practices and design system foundations

Building the Team & Design Practice

One of my first priorities was building a strong in-house design team. During the first year, we grew from three consultants to seven in-house product designers, working across multiple product teams alongside an existing UX researcher.

Growing people and capabilities

I introduced a shared design competency framework to support individual development and clarify career progression. Through regular 1:1s, we combined feedback on ongoing work with longer-term goals, while using the framework to identify strengths and development needs across the team.

Alongside this, I strengthened our design practice through:

• Craft and collaboration – Introduced design critiques and shared forums to raise design quality and encourage learning.

• Ownership and empowerment – Gave designers greater ownership and influence in cross-functional product teams.

• Ways of working – Strengthened collaboration in product trios and introduced continuous discovery practices.

Together, these efforts helped build a stronger, more independent design team with greater influence on product direction.

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

This work strengthened both the design team and its contribution to product development at Readly.

• Growing talent – Supported a senior designer's progression into a UX Lead role and a junior designer's development to mid-level through structured coaching and clearer career expectations.

• Building design capability – Grew the team from three consultants to seven in-house product designers, establishing stronger ownership and shared practices.

• Strengthening product discovery – Introduced more continuous research and cross-functional collaboration, bringing design closer to early product decisions.

• Creating product direction – Established a clearer experience vision and stronger design system foundations across platforms.

• Evolving the product experience – Contributed to new capabilities including article-based reading and audio listening.