My first proper leadership role, and I started by building the thing that didn't exist. E.ON UK had no in-house digital UX or UI team — the work went out to agencies. I set up the first one, and we became the guardians of the design system, running a portfolio of customer-facing projects across the digital estate alongside delivery, CX and product owners. Energy is a product nobody chooses and everybody's stuck with, so the bar was simple: make it bearable, then make it good.

A small, established Nottingham agency working with national and global brands. I owned projects end-to-end – discovery and audits through to sitemaps, user journeys, wireframes and the finished UI, then prepped for build with the developers. The kind of place where you scope the work, present it to the client yourself, and answer for the outcome. Senior craft with the range agency work demands: brand, motion, the occasional bit of print, all of it to a high bar.

E-commerce and services at scale on Boots.com. I designed conversion-focused journeys – booking flows, service pages, the paths that had to work first time – and spent as much time in analytics as in Figma, reading funnel performance with the Data & Insights team and distilling simple answers from genuinely complex information. Weekly sprints alongside developers and product owners, high traffic, real commercial stakes, quick feedback loops. This sharpened the discipline of designing to evidence rather than opinion.

Six years in a 250-strong creative agency, cutting my teeth as a UX designer across a constant rotation of high-profile brands. Information architecture, wireframes, journey maps, prototypes and the finished interfaces – plus running client workshops and design sprints. One of those briefs was PayPal's digital components: regulated financial tools where the details aren't negotiable. Agency work throws a different problem at you every week, and a room that'll push back on every decision. Everything I do now was built here.