Flink · Design Leadership · 2021–2024

Leading Flink's product design team through three years of scale

As Senior Product Design Manager, my job stopped being about the screens I drew and became about the team, the system and the strategy behind everyone else's. This is that side of the job.

Leadership

I owned hiring, mentoring and career growth for the Consumer design team: sourcing and interviewing for senior and mid-level product designers and UX writers, running onboarding, and holding regular career-coaching one-to-ones. I also built Flink's product design career framework from the ground up, benchmarking it against career ladders at companies like GitLab and Buzzfeed before adapting it to our own competencies, from craft and mentorship to product leadership and design operations. That framework went on to inform how the wider People team structured career conversations across the company.

Strategy

I owned the long-term strategy for Flink's design system: the case for why it mattered as the app scaled across markets, what it needed to include, shared components, tokens and governance across UI, UX, writing and motion, and how we'd get there, starting with an audit against systems like Atlassian's, Shopify's and Adobe's Spectrum. Accessibility wasn't a checkbox: I pushed for WCAG AA compliance ahead of the European Accessibility Act's 2025 deadline, treating it as a baseline for who could use the app at all, not an afterthought.

Cross-functional collaboration

Design didn't sit downstream of product at Flink. I aligned directly with product directors on annual OKRs and quarterly planning, and supported product managers across squads with problem framing and hypothesis creation before a single screen got drawn. I also kept design tied to brand, running regular sessions on typography, colour and tone so the app and the marketing people saw felt like the same company.

Impact

The career framework I built was adopted org-wide as the basis for career conversations beyond design. Design iteration cycles fell 15% over my time there, and I grew the Consumer design org through a full hiring cycle across senior, mid-level and writing roles. By my final year, my own scope had grown wide enough that leadership planned dedicated hires just to carry part of it, a fair proxy for how much of the org was running through that seat.