Resume
Design leader with 11+ years of building design functions inside product organisations. I have led design teams, owned design system governance across distributed multi-squad orgs, and built the QA and documentation practice across product squads. My work sits mostly in regulated and infrastructure-constrained environments, such as M-PESA, where I designed statement verification for over 50 million users.
For the past year, I have run my own studio, advising leadership teams on raising design maturity and building AI-native products hands-on. I am now looking to lead design inside one product organisation rather than across many.
- Built and run the studio end to end: team structure, decision frameworks, partner operating agreements and delivery rhythms, all set from zero.
- Advise client leadership on raising design maturity using the Design Maturity Matrix, run with organisations across Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.
- Set and hold the quality bar across parallel client engagements with a small team, with full accountability for outcomes.
- Designed and shipped Kauli, an AI diagnostic product, end to end as sole designer and builder: interaction model, Claude API backend, deployment on Railway, Supabase and Vercel, with the UI built from Figma using the Figma MCP.
- Built Daro, a cohort programme for founders, designed as a product with behavioural change as the success measure.
- Managed four junior and mid-weight designers across the platform and CX squads, reporting to the Principal Designer.
- Introduced Design QA and documentation systems across four product squads, cutting design-to-development rework by approximately 30%.
- Owned UX across the full customer lifecycle, from acquisition and activation through PAYG, support and loyalty, for a clean cooking platform serving over 1.2 million households in Kenya and Rwanda.
- Designed against $50 to $80 Android devices as a hard constraint: low RAM, intermittent connectivity, users moving from feature phones.
- Turned in-home behavioural and field research into product architecture decisions rather than interface refinements.
- Owned design system governance across a distributed, multi-team product organisation.
- Designed enterprise products for Safaricom Business; details available on request.
- Designed digital statement verification for M-PESA's 50M+ users, replacing in-branch verification with a self-serve flow that cut related support tickets by 40% and removed tens of thousands of daily service-centre visits.
- Made the case for inclusion as a delivery requirement, including a USSD fallback so feature-phone users kept access.
- Ran A/B testing cadences on core flows to settle design disagreements with evidence rather than seniority.
- Co-designed and launched Bohoka, a mobile-first mental health and peer support platform for young people in Rwanda, adopted by thousands across underserved regions.
- Ran co-design workshops and in-person behavioural testing in low-connectivity, low-literacy settings.
- Designed navigation that needed no onboarding tutorial, and engagement loops for return usage.
- Redesigned SACCO digital banking onboarding and Bulk SMS for cooperative members with low prior digital banking exposure; onboarding conversion and member engagement improved post-launch.
- Led design across Nairobi and Lagos teams reporting into US-based leadership.
- Built Ajua's first design system and structured handoff documentation.
- Led UX and product design for a customer-experience intelligence platform launched with MTN Nigeria.
- Shipped e-commerce interfaces across multiple African markets and introduced A/B testing to core conversion funnels.
Figma, Adobe Creative Suite and Framer. User-centered design, user research and usability testing. Strategic, collaborative, equally comfortable mentoring teams and working hands-on.
Interested in design systems at scale, building for constraint, and using AI tools hands-on to build and ship product myself.