I studied illustration. I ended up at JPMorgan Chase. In between: a neobank in Nairobi, a 34-person design team at one of the UK's biggest banks, and more pivots than I can count. Here's what I've learned about work along the way.
Most career advice is built around the idea that you should know where you're going. Pick a destination. Work backwards. Stay on the path. I've spent the better part of two decades proving that this model is, at best, incomplete — and at worst, a way to miss the most interesting opportunities entirely.
I graduated from Falmouth with a degree in illustration. Nobody looks at that CV line and predicts a future executive director of user experience at a global investment bank. But that's exactly the point. The creative discipline you build early — learning to see problems, to make the abstract concrete, to tell a story through a single image — turns out to be extraordinarily transferable. I just didn't know it yet.
On the value of going sideways
There's a version of a career that looks impressive on paper: a clean vertical climb through progressively senior roles at recognisable brands, each move a logical step up from the last. I have deep respect for people who've built that. I just haven't been one of them.
My moves have more often been lateral, or diagonal, or — on at least one occasion — to an entirely different continent. When I joined 4G Capital as chief product officer, I was leaving the relative comfort of a large UK bank to work with a small East African fintech serving micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya and Uganda. By conventional logic, it was a strange move. In practice, it was one of the most formative things I've ever done.
Working in Nairobi taught me things no London role could have. About building products under genuine constraint. About the gap between what users say and what they do, when the stakes for getting it wrong are very real. About my own assumptions — the mental models I'd carried around as truths that turned out to be specifically Western, specifically middle-class, specifically mine. Unlearning is underrated.
On scale, and what it teaches you
Before Nairobi, I spent almost five years at Lloyds Banking Group. I arrived thinking, with the particular arrogance of someone in their mid-career, that I had little left to learn from a large institution. I was wrong about that too.
Building and leading a 34-person service design team inside a complex, regulated, legacy organisation is a masterclass in things they don't teach you: how change actually moves through a hierarchy, how to translate creative conviction into language that resonates with risk teams and boards, how to protect the work without becoming defensive about it. You learn patience. You learn politics — not in the pejorative sense, but in the real sense: understanding what different people need in order to move in the same direction.
That experience is what makes the work I do now at JPMorgan Chase feel coherent, even if the surface looks different. Using design thinking and AI to rethink how thousands of colleagues navigate financial crime and surveillance isn't so far from building a service design practice inside a bank. The problems are systemic. The humans are complex. The constraints are very real. The craft is still the same.
On the thread through it all
If I had to name the consistent thing — across illustration, agency work, fintech, banking, and now one of the world's largest financial institutions — it's this: I am most useful at the point where something is genuinely unclear.
Ambiguity, which most organisations treat as a problem to be eliminated as quickly as possible, is actually where the interesting work happens. The question nobody has properly framed yet. The tension between what the business wants to do and what users actually need. The gap between the strategy deck and the reality on the ground. That's where I find my footing.
I think this comes from the illustration background, if I'm honest. When you're trained to make images, you learn early that your job is to find the essential thing — the one element that carries all the meaning — and make it visible. That instinct hasn't left me. It's just applied to systems and organisations now, rather than paper.
On writing it down
I've written through most of my career changes — retrospectives, reflections, occasional lists of things I've learned. Not because I have a content strategy, but because the act of writing is how I process what's happened and figure out what it means.
What I've come to believe is that the unconventional path isn't a liability. The breadth — creative, commercial, startup, enterprise, African market, global bank — is the thing. It means I can hold more of a problem at once. It means I'm less wedded to the way things have always been done in any particular discipline or sector. It means the next unexpected move, when it comes, won't feel like a detour. It'll feel like the next part of the same journey.