Head of product design at Heidi

My understanding of the role at Heidi

Heidi is at the point where design can become infrastructure for trust, quality, and scale. Here's how I see the role, and what I would bring to it.

My reading of the role

The brief is unusually specific. It is not asking for a design manager who can keep a team running, but a hands-on design leader who can raise the quality of the product by being close to the work. I read seven signals in it.

“A Head of Product Design who still designs.” You want a leader whose hands stay on the craft, not one who drifts into management.
“Own and evolve the design system as product infrastructure.” The strategic centre of the role: as the product grows, coherence has to come from infrastructure, not heroics.
“Translate complex clinical workflows into experiences clinicians trust on instinct.” Trust under clinical stakes is the real bar, not polish.
“You build with AI tools, and can show what you have made.” A builder, not a deck-maker. Proof over promises.
“Make the product feel like the work of one person.” The hardest line: coherence across many builders, as the product sprawls beyond the note.
“Your eye is the last filter before anything reaches clinicians.” A demonstrable craft eye that can hold the quality bar and sign off.
“Partner with the Head of Brand.” Brand and product design are distinct functions here, and the seam between them matters.

Your opportunity

Heidi has already found something rare: a product that gives clinicians time back. The next opportunity is to make that value scale without losing trust.

Make trust scale. Create consistent patterns that help clinicians understand, verify, and rely on Heidi.
Turn the design system into product infrastructure. Make quality easier to repeat as more teams build more surfaces.
Define the experience of the AI Care Partner. Move beyond scribing into a coherent model for how clinicians work with AI, evidence, and patient context.
Use compliance as a creative constraint. Build confidence into the product from the atomic level, rather than treating safety as an external checkpoint.
Create a design culture with taste and pace. Help designers, PMs, engineers, clinicians, and brand teams make better decisions faster.

What you need

To realise this opportunity, Heidi needs someone who can operate across several modes at once. You need:

A hands-on craft leader who can set the bar through the work, not just through critique.
A systems thinker who can make the product feel coherent as the company scales.
A product strategist who can work inside clinical workflow complexity and bring design into decisions early.
An AI-native builder who can prototype, test, and use AI as a working medium.
A team builder who can hire, coach, and develop designers embedded across pods.
A strategic storyteller who can translate founder vision and product ambition into a narrative teams can act on.
A design leader with lived sensitivity to healthcare who understands that patient data is not abstract. It is someone’s life, carried through a system.

What I bring

The breadth of experience I bring

I make complex systems legible

I have spent my career finding the shape inside complexity, across enterprise products, government services, transformation programs, and large teams. The work is always to name the tension, make the system visible, and create enough clarity that people can move.

I understand design as strategy, not decoration

Design begins with words: before an interface there is a frame, before a pattern a principle, before a product decision a story about what matters. I build the visions, blueprints, and operating models that shift how an organisation understands what it is making, not just how each screen works.

I stay close to the work

Design leadership shouldn’t drift into the abstract. The best leaders still review the work, write the sentence, question the flow, and catch the edge case. Taste isn’t a mood; it is a discipline, built through decisions, critique, and caring about details others rush past.

I can help make taste scale

Heidi’s product should feel like it was designed by one person, even as it is built by many, and that takes systems. I treat the design system as product infrastructure: not just components and tokens, but shared judgment, trust behaviours, content rules, and a clear bar for what good looks like.

I bring strategic narrative

One of my strongest skills is turning complexity into a story people can act on, through executive presentations, product visions, and founding Design Outlook. Narrative isn’t decoration; it’s how teams know what they’re part of, and how a company moves fast without losing coherence.

How I work with AI

I use AI every day to write, code, prototype, research, and challenge my own assumptions. I don’t see it as a shortcut around craft, but as a way to raise the ceiling of what one person can make. AI amplifies what is already there: with weak thinking it just makes weak thinking faster; with judgment, taste, and human insight, it becomes extraordinary.

I know healthcare from the inside

I have lived much of my life as a patient. A pacemaker at eight. Three replacements since. Clinical treatment for bipolar and depression since sixteen. An ADHD diagnosis at forty. I share this not as a credential, but as context: I know what it feels like to be reduced to a record, carried as fragments of a story but not the whole of you. If Heidi is going to reshape how clinicians work with patient data, design has to protect the person inside that data.

I build teams with care and ambition

I build high-performing teams through clarity, trust, standards, and attention to individual strengths: regular one-on-ones, strengths-based coaching, direct feedback, and a high bar. I care about kindness and excellence in equal measure. The best teams are safe enough to be honest and ambitious enough to improve.

I care about the mission

The version of Heidi that matters most to me isn’t one that makes healthcare feel more automated. It’s one that gives clinicians more presence, more confidence, more time, and more capacity to see the person in front of them. This role sits where everything that has shaped my life and work meets: design as clarity, AI as amplification, narrative as alignment, systems as leverage, and healthcare as lived experience.