Hello, I’m David. A pragmatic and hands-on product design leader. I’m known for starting and building high-performing teams with a focus on craft. I’m as much about rolling up your sleeves as steering the ship to get things done.
I believe design is critical to business success.
Product principles and design methods
1. Begin and end with people
Learn from people and deliver products that are centred around their needs to inform the right decisions. Customer insights help deliver better outcomes.
2. Design local, think global
Design with an eye towards the future of the product. Value flexible and scalable design that can evolve and build towards a vision.
3. Less but better
Start small and focus; work in sprints to prioritise team efforts, iterate effectively and create experiences that address specific users’ needs.
4. Objective not subjective
Just because you like it, it doesn’t mean it works: use evidence not personal preference to deliver user experiences and drive success.
5. Feedback is fuel
Use qualitative and quantitative feedback from user testing and critiques to make informed, data-driven design decisions that deliver the right experience.
6. Beautiful and useable
First impressions do count and influence attitudes big or small. Create beautiful interfaces to drive momentum and build on our positive relationships with customers.
Impact of design
I encourage a hypothesis-driven approach and the use of lean experiment maps to guide decisions, measure impact, learn and define next steps to demonstrate success.
I’m passionate about measuring business impact using key metrics, learning from feedback, task completion rate, conversion rate, time and cost efficiencies to demonstrate business ROI.
Career history
Plum
Director of Product Design
2023 – 2024 – Leading Product and Design at Plum to build future wealth with AI.
Shopify
Senior UX Manager
2021 – 2023 – Leading Money Teams at Shopify to make commerce better for everyone.
NewDay Ltd
Head of Product Design
2019 – 2021 – NewDay is a credit card provider on a mission to help people be better with credit.
Cognizant
Head of Digital Products, Experience Design
2018 – 2019 – Cognizant is an international consultancy of 265,000 employees with 52 offices worldwide, where I led the Cognizant UK and Ireland Experience design team.
Burrow Mortgages (Acquired)
Director of Product
2016 – 2018 – Acquired by Norland Capital (Announced June 2018)
Founding team – Passion Capital backed Fintech startup. Previously known as Dwell Mortgages, Burrow is a smarter way to get a mortgage.
Consultant / Freelancer
Director of Product, Head of Design, Director of Design, Product designer, UX, UI
2010 – 2016 – Working directly with clients, established brands, digital advertising agencies and startups. Advising through design, defining and realising product vision, prototyping, testing with users to find product market fit.
Nokia
Senior designer
2008 – 2010 – Working in the Nokia design team across services and devices.
Consulting
Product Design Lead / Strategy / Vision (Consulting)
Kin+Carta (The App Business)
The App Business is a technology consultancy specialising in app transformation and design. Worked on a number key accounts Ford Motors and News UK.
Experience Product design lead (Consulting)
eBay Inc
Consulted for eBay creating new products and ventures with the eBay Innovation Group. Launched eBay Hire – Professional services marketplace in London and San Francisco.
Product Design Lead / Strategy / Vision (Consulting)
Lumi.do
Last.fm founders new startup. Lumi is a personalized news magazine using powerful data science to curate the latest news stories and videos based on your reading patterns, interests, Facebook friends and Twitter following.
Senior Product Design Lead / Creative Director (Consulting)
Badoo
Hands on working along side the founders Andrey, Maxim, Sergey. Responsible for leading UX and UI to deliver new features and develop Badoo’s product on mobile and web.
Ventures & ideas
Loveflutter (Sunset)
Co-founder
Startup I co-founded Loveflutter with Daigo Smith. Loveflutter helps you meet people nearby and if you both like each other, send each other a message and send a great place to meet.
Press
TechCrunch – https://techcrunch.com/tag/loveflutter/
Design decisions are business decisions.
© David Standen