From a translation booth in Las Vegas to a regulated-finance design system
This is the ten-year version, not the ACY version. It starts in 2016 with my first paid job — on-site interpreter at a Las Vegas sourcing show — and runs through freelance landing pages, a design studio I co-founded and lost, an MFA, a full-stack year at Christie's, and the nearly-five-year engagement at ACY that became the deepest chapter. The case studies show what shipped. This page shows the arc that produced the judgment behind it.
People ask how many years I have. The honest answer: a decade-plus of work, nine-plus of it in design — I just haven't spent all of it in finance. Like a migratory bird, the craft is the constant and the industry is the terrain: garment sourcing, auto shows, enterprise events, consumer toys, ultra-high-end real estate, and — for nearly five years, the longest habitat yet — regulated finance.
One habit shows up in every chapter: standing between two worlds and building the thing that connects them.
In 2016 the two worlds were a Chinese sourcing delegation and an American trade show, and the thing that connected them was me, translating in real time. A year later the connective tissue became a website. Then a product. Then a design system inside a regulated broker. The medium kept changing; the job — make something complex legible to the people who need to act on it — never did.
The chapters below are honest about the parts that didn't work: a studio that a trade war and a pandemic wound down inside eighteen months, a redesign I had to pull, a title that trailed the scope for years. I'd rather you read the whole arc — the mis-steps included — than a résumé that only lists the wins.
Act I
The foundation years — interpreter, freelancer, founder
2016 – 2021 · Las Vegas · Los Angeles · Guangzhou · San Francisco
Before there was a design system, there were one-off gigs — a translation booth, six garment factories, an auto show, a studio that didn't survive a trade war. None of it was a straight line, and all of it compounded.
2016 · Las Vegas
Sourcing at MAGIC — the first paycheck
On-site interpreter · not design
My first strictly-paid job wasn't a website — it was a headset. I worked the floor at Sourcing at MAGIC, the Las Vegas apparel trade show, as a live interpreter for a sourcing delegation out of Xintang, Guangzhou. Standing between a Chinese factory team and American buyers, translating specs and prices in real time, is where the whole career actually starts: I was the connective tissue before I ever designed anything.
2016 – 2018 · San Francisco
Six garment factories — my first real product work
Freelance · bilingual landing pages + online booking
After that first MAGIC, the delegation asked for something the interpreter could also build: bilingual (Simplified Chinese + English) landing pages and an online appointment system so overseas buyers could book factory meetings before the next show. Six factories in total. The same factories returned to Sourcing at MAGIC in 2017 and 2018; after the 2018 edition they stopped exhibiting and the engagement wound down.
2017 · San Francisco
LA Auto Show — learning to ship on a deadline
Freelance · event landing pages · 3 clients
The LA Auto Show turned into three separate briefs for quick-turn event landing pages. This is the season I learned the freelancer's core discipline: a real client, a hard date, and a page that has to be live and working before the doors open — no room for precious process.
2018 · San Francisco
GTC, IBM Index & Eudora Tattoo Studio
Freelance · event & brand sites
A spread of one-off builds — GTC, IBM Index, and Eudora Tattoo Studio. Freelance at this stage was one gig at a time: some clients came back the next year, some didn't. What it built was range — event tech, enterprise developer conference, and an independent studio, all in the same twelve months, each with a completely different audience.
2019 – 2020 · San Francisco
Phonex Design Studio — the one I co-founded and lost
Co-founder · design studio
I co-founded Phonex Design Studio with Mark Garcia, one of my design professors. The unlock was oddly personal: the plush-toy and garment manufacturers I'd met in the interpreter booth in 2016 became a real supply chain, and that network is how a young studio landed orders for Hasbro.
Then the macro caught up with us. Tariffs and COVID collapsed the gross margin almost overnight — the arbitrage the whole model depended on evaporated. We wound the studio down after about eighteen months. It's the chapter that taught me unit economics the hard way: you can design something beautiful and still lose to a number on a customs form. I was finishing my MFA (Academy of Art University) in parallel, and graduated at the end of 2020.
2021 · San Francisco
Christie's — a full year building for the ultra-high-end
Web Application Developer · solo full-stack
Early 2021 to the end of 2021 at Christie's as a Web Application Developer — a solo full-stack build of an editorial property platform for an ultra-high-net-worth audience. It was my first taste of a domain where trust is the product, where the polish of the interface and the credibility of the brand are the same thing. That instinct is exactly what regulated finance would demand a year later. See the Christie's case study →
January 2022 · Sydney · Taipei
ACY Securities — where the arc goes deep
Product Designer → Senior Product Designer · Act II below
Everything above was one gig at a time. In January 2022 I joined ACY as one of four designers — and stayed long enough for the work to compound into design-lead scope. That's the second act.
The same handful of relationships kept paying off in forms I couldn't have predicted.
The interpreter job in 2016 wasn't just a paycheck — it was a network. The factory owners I translated for became the clients for my first websites, and then the supply chain for a design studio's Hasbro orders three years later. One trade-show floor seeded a decade of work.
I put this on the record because it's the honest mechanism behind an "overnight" portfolio: none of it was a plan. It was showing up in rooms most designers never enter — a sourcing floor, a customs negotiation, a factory line — and being the person who could both speak the language and build the thing. That intersection is still what I do; the vocabulary just moved from garment specs to leverage caps.
Four instincts I brought into fintech that most designers have to learn on the job.
- Ran a studio's P&L through a tariff shock and a pandemic — margin, supply chain, and unit economics aren't abstractions to me, they're why a company I co-founded closed
- This is the lens I now bring to CFO decks and pricing surfaces — not a service I sell, a way I read a product
- Auto-show and trade-show sites don't slip — the doors open whether the page is ready or not
- Years before regulatory deadlines, the freelance years taught me to scope to the date and ship the thing that has to work
- Bilingual builds, factory negotiations, an ultra-high-end brand, an enterprise conference — range was the job from day one
- Moving between a factory owner, a buyer, and a brand is the same muscle I'd later use between a trader, a CFO, and an auditor
- From hand-coded landing pages to a solo full-stack build at Christie's, I've shipped the code, not just the mockup
- It's why my design-to-engineering handoffs are specs an engineer can build from, not artefacts they have to interpret
Act II · the deepest chapter
ACY Securities — nearly five years, five platforms, one design system
January 2022 – present · ACYLogix Group (ACY Securities / Zerologix)
The freelance years were breadth. ACY is depth. I joined as one of four designers and stayed through several full team cycles — four, solo, four again — leading design through every one. The product estate grew from a fragmented five-platform sprawl into a single design system serving 100,000+ traders across 40+ regulated jurisdictions. In January 2026, four years in, the title caught up: promoted to Senior Product Designer.
Staying at one company for years is either coasting or compounding. This is the honest reading: I stayed because the work kept compounding — and the title has now caught up.
A near-five-year engagement in this industry reads two ways to a recruiter on first glance. Either I got comfortable and the role stopped teaching me, or the work kept growing and I kept growing with it. The honest reading is the second: the scope compounded year over year, and the promotion to Senior Product Designer in January 2026 confirmed it.
The short version: I was hired as a mid-level product designer on a four-person team. Within the first year, the other three designers left for larger companies. I stayed — not out of loyalty, but because the problem in front of me kept getting more interesting. Regulatory deadlines I'd never seen. A five-platform estate held together by tape. A design system that didn't exist yet. Executives who started asking me to design investor decks and financial data visualisations. Designers I hired, ramped, and led through full team cycles. The scope kept moving up; for four years the title trailed it, and in January 2026 — exactly four years in — it finally caught up.
The long version is below, and it's honest about the parts I got wrong too — because a case study that only shows the wins is a pitch, not a record. The project-level detail lives in the ACY case study; this is the surrounding narrative.
The logos on the org chart — most of them are mine.
When people look at the ACYLogix Group organisation chart they see the structure: parent company, subsidiaries, ownership lines. What they don't see is that roughly 90% of the marks on that chart — ACY Group, ACY Securities, ACY Capital, ACY Wealth, ACY Advisory, ACY Connect, Zerologix, Zerologix Taiwan, Logixel, and ACYLogix itself — are logos I designed over these four years.
Brand identity wasn't in the job description. It happened because the group kept forming new entities — a new jurisdiction licence here, a new B2B line there — and each needed a mark that fit the family without looking derivative. After the first two, leadership stopped briefing external agencies and started briefing me directly. That's how a product designer quietly ended up owning the visual identity of an eight-entity financial-services group.
A product designer who can also hold the line on corporate identity is rare in fintech. It meant the design system, the product UIs, and the brand marks all evolved from one visual sensibility — no "brand team says one thing, product team says another" drift. For a firm where the brand is the product — institutional finance, where trust is the core asset — that's not a nice-to-have; it's why the whole ecosystem reads as one company instead of eight.
The first regulatory deadline nearly broke the company. It's what built the design system.
Five months into the role, ASIC (the Australian financial regulator — the local equivalent of the SEC in the US or the FCA in the UK) issued a Product Intervention Order: every Australian broker had to implement new leverage restrictions across every product surface within 14 days.
Leverage, for anyone outside the industry: it's the ratio of position size to the cash a trader actually puts down. A broker offering 500:1 leverage lets a $1,000 deposit control a $500,000 position — which is how retail traders lose their savings in a morning. ASIC had decided the industry's leverage caps were too permissive, and gave us two weeks to change everything that displayed or enforced those caps.
At that point we had five platforms — a marketing site, a trading terminal, an institutional-facing CRM (a tool broker staff use to manage client accounts), a market-analysis product, and a social-trading product — each with its own UI, its own codebase, its own way of showing leverage. Forty-plus screens needed changing. Each platform was maintained by a different engineering pod. Nothing was shared.
The tactical brief was "add a warning modal and a leverage-cap validator." Leadership reframed it: what if we used this deadline to build the foundation we should have built a year ago? Ten extra days of work now, but the next regulatory update doesn't take 14 days — it takes three.
That strategic call came from above me. My job was to translate it into something designable in 14 days: what the shared architecture should look like, how compliance logic should be encoded, and which screens ship on day 14.
What I did in those two weeks
I audited twelve touchpoints across the five platforms and mapped every inconsistency. Then I proposed a single compliance primitive — one Leverage Indicator component, one Risk Warning component — that every platform would render. The regulation wouldn't live inside a specific screen anymore. It would live inside one component, and every screen would inherit it.
This sounds obvious in hindsight. In the moment, it was an argument I had to win with six different stakeholders in 48 hours: engineering worried about migration cost, legal wanted a one-off fix they could sign off quickly, product worried about a two-week roadmap slip, and the CEO wanted to know why we were spending extra time when ASIC just wanted the warnings up.
The argument that landed with the CEO wasn't a UX argument. It was a risk-adjusted ROI argument: ten extra days now buys roughly five years of compliance stability. Every future regulatory update — ESMA, FCA, FINRA — would drop into this architecture instead of triggering another cross-platform rebuild.
The lead engineer on Platform 3 came back with a specific objection: "A shared component is a shared failure point. If there's a bug in the Leverage Indicator, it breaks across all five platforms simultaneously. Right now each team owns their own implementation and their own risk."
He was right about the risk. His solution — keep five separate implementations — was wrong about the trade-off. I pulled up the audit I'd just done: across the five platforms, the leverage cap was implemented five different ways, three of which had edge cases I could demonstrate in ten minutes. The shared-component risk was theoretical; the inconsistency risk was already live. I proposed a versioned rollout — Platform 1 first, two weeks of monitoring, then Platform 2 — so each team kept control of their own schedule. That satisfied the autonomy concern without abandoning the shared architecture.
The engineer ended up being the person who maintained the component library for the next year. He brought it up during a handoff conversation later as a decision he was glad we'd made.
We made the deadline. Twelve days, not fourteen. Zero design-related regulatory violations in the two-plus years since. Eight subsequent regulatory updates — ASIC leverage caps, ESMA inducement bans (EU rules against broker incentives that influence retail behaviour), FCA risk-warning updates — each slotted in through the compliance primitives in three to five days, not three to four weeks.
Regulatory requirements are design specifications, not legal hurdles.
What I learned from Chapter 1
Two things, and they've shaped how I work ever since.
First, regulatory requirements are design specifications, not legal hurdles. The instinct of most teams is to treat compliance as a gate at the end — get the design done, show it to legal, wait for markup, revise. That model breaks under a 14-day deadline. The only way to ship was to treat ASIC's rules as design inputs from day one, the same way typography rules or grid constraints are inputs. Once compliance is a design input, the question stops being "can we ship this?" and becomes "what's the most elegant way to encode the rule?"
Second, bring legal in on day one, not day four. My first ASIC deadline, I brought legal in on day four of the 14-day window. We burnt two days debating warning placement I could have avoided by showing them wireframes on day one. I've never made that mistake since. I now run a weekly design-legal sync wherever I work, and compliance-related revision rounds dropped from three or four per feature to one.
The team left. I was running design at a 150-person broker.
Over the course of 2022, the other three designers I'd been hired alongside moved on. One to a bigger consumer-fintech company, one to a Tier 1 bank, one to a Silicon Valley SaaS firm. All three were good moves for them — I've stayed in touch with all of them, and I take their moves as a quiet signal that the work here trains people up.
I didn't become head of design by design. I became it because there was no one else left. And the work didn't get smaller; it got bigger. By late 2022, I was the single point of failure for design across five production platforms, with three engineering teams implementing in parallel, in two timezones (Sydney design, Taipei engineering, with a three-hour overlap window).
What changed in how I worked
When you're the only designer for five products, you can't be a designer who does screens. You have to be a designer who does systems. I shifted almost all of my time into:
- Component governance. I ran a monthly audit of the Figma library — which components were used, which were decaying, which were being misused by engineers. I rewrote the documentation from "how to implement" to "when to use and when not to use," and the misuse rate dropped from around 30% to under 8% once the docs focused on intent rather than code.
- Handoff infrastructure. With a three-hour overlap window between Sydney and Taipei, I couldn't rely on real-time conversations. Every Figma spec got dual-language annotations (English design rationale, Mandarin implementation notes), and engineering misreads dropped from roughly weekly to roughly monthly.
- Self-service enablement. When I did hire designers again (three of them, at different points), I needed them to ramp to their first independent contribution in two weeks, not two months. That forced me to document the system the way I'd document an API — with examples, constraints, and failure modes, not just pretty Figma files.
The design I got wrong
In 2022, I redesigned Finlogix — our market-analysis product — on the assumption that traders were overwhelmed by data density and would benefit from a cleaner, more minimal layout. I removed secondary panels, simplified the chart toolbar, reduced the default data columns. It looked much better by every visual-design metric I knew.
Usability sessions (n=8, active traders with six-plus months on the platform) told a different story. Users felt less confident in the new version, not more. The panels I'd removed weren't clutter — they were peripheral vision. Experienced traders scan them continuously without consciously reading them. Taking them away didn't reduce cognitive load; it increased it, because now users had to actively seek information they used to absorb passively.
The kicker: my "task completion time" metric went down in the redesign. Users finished tasks faster. But task confidence — "how certain are you about this trade?" — dropped 31%. A faster, less confident trading decision is a worse outcome, not a better one. I'd picked the wrong proxy metric and let it confirm a wrong hypothesis.
The redesign was pulled. We rebuilt the improvement case around a different question: not "how do we show less?" but "how do we make the existing density faster to parse?" That reframe is what eventually produced the 40% analysis-time reduction in the Finlogix we shipped. The lesson I've carried into every financial product since: density isn't the problem; unstructured density is.
Density isn't the problem. Unstructured density is.
In 2023, ASIC issued updated guidance on cross-border disclosure — the regulation that required our clients to see jurisdiction-specific risk warnings before each transaction. Legal's initial interpretation was conservative: a full interstitial modal before every single order, across all instruments, every session. Estimated UX impact: 3.2% order abandonment per the A/B data we already had.
I pushed back — not on the regulation, but on Legal's interpretation of it. I read the actual ASIC guidance text, identified the phrase "meaningful engagement," and argued that a blocking modal the user clicks through in muscle memory after day three does not constitute meaningful engagement. A one-line contextual disclosure on the order ticket itself — co-located with the action — met the engagement standard better than the modal, not worse.
Legal pushed back: "If we get audited, the modal is easier to defend." I acknowledged that directly — they were right that a modal produces a cleaner audit trail. I then asked whether we could produce an equivalent audit trail from the inline pattern, by logging the disclosure render event with timestamp, instrument, and client ID. Legal said yes. We shipped the inline pattern with that logging, and it survived the next ASIC review cycle without a question raised.
The lesson: the compliance argument you actually win is not "trust me, this is fine." It's "let me show you how we can satisfy your audit requirement through a different mechanism." Legal's job is to be defensible. If you give them a defensible path, they'll usually take it.
Mid-2024 the team was back to just me. The scope didn't shrink with it.
In the middle of 2024, the design team was reduced to me. Five product lines, retail and institutional, with live compliance obligations across forty-plus jurisdictions. Concurrent deliverables that quarter included the consumer mobile app (iOS and Android, already live with a 5.0★ App Store rating), institutional API documentation (for hedge funds connecting via the FIX protocol — a standardised messaging format most institutional trading systems speak), multilingual campaign pages (Arabic, English, Vietnamese), rebate-and-ambassador pages, and compliance updates across all five platforms.
The honest reaction most designers would have is: ask for more headcount. I did ask — and headcount wasn't available in that window. So the constraint became a workflow-architecture problem instead of a staffing problem.
How I restructured the workflow
I leaned heavily on AI as a generation-and-iteration layer, while keeping every judgment call human. The division of labour that emerged, and still holds today:
- Regulatory context — what ASIC/FCA/ESMA actually require, and how it applies to this specific screen
- Business intent — what outcome this product is supposed to produce for the company
- Design constraints — the system boundaries, the hierarchy, the patterns that already exist
- The judgment filter — validating every output against the reality of the market and the user
- Generation — first drafts of copy, layout variations, component options
- Structuring — turning raw notes into organised specs and documentation
- Iteration speed — testing five variations of an approach in the time one used to take
- Pattern work — catching inconsistencies across large files I can't hold in my head at once
The key principle, which I repeat to anyone asking about my process: domain judgment stays human. I decide what to build and why. AI helps with how fast I can explore and iterate. If I let AI make judgment calls in a regulated financial product, a user gets hurt. If I refuse to use AI at all, I don't ship on time. Neither is acceptable, so the workflow is structured around that division clearly.
Domain judgment stays human. AI decides nothing in a regulated product.
The same approach is demonstrated interactively in the Operating Model case study — it's not theory, it's how I actually work.
What the solo year taught me that the team years didn't
Two things.
First, a design system's value is most visible when there's nobody else to lean on. When you're the only designer, every hour spent hand-crafting a component that should have been systematised is an hour the product doesn't get. The components I'd built in 2022–2023 — the compliance primitives, the modular widget system, the typography scale — paid back hundreds of hours in 2024 that I simply didn't have otherwise. I designed the system for a team; it saved the product when the team wasn't there.
Second, the constraint changes what "good" looks like. In a team, good design is thorough design. In a solo year with five platforms, good design is triaged design — the deliberate, documented decision that a flow is "good enough for now, revisit in Q2." I got better at writing down why I hadn't done something, so that future-me (or a future hire) wouldn't waste time rediscovering the same trade-off.
The work now is part design, part capital markets. I didn't see that coming.
Starting in late 2024, the CEO began assigning me work I didn't expect: investor presentations, SPAC materials (documents used when a private company goes public through a merger with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company), financial data visualisations for the CFO, regulatory communications for the CRO (Chief Risk Officer). There was no product-manager layer for this work. The CEO would send me the brief directly. The CFO would annotate the Figma files for same-day sign-off.
I didn't have a background in capital-markets materials. I did have a background in making complex information legible, which turned out to be the same skill applied to a different audience. The discipline of "information hierarchy, audience awareness, progressive disclosure" doesn't care whether the audience is a first-time trader or an institutional investor — the mechanics are the same; the vocabulary changes.
Work from this chapter
- CEO investor deck. The draft led with growth (200% YoY) but treated the regulatory-compliance track as a footnote. I argued for structuring the narrative as "growth plus governance" — how we scaled compliance alongside user acquisition, not despite it. That reframe made it into the final pitch and is the structure the company now uses for its investor story.
- CFO financial projections. FY27–FY28 projection tables were organised as a single consolidated view. I restructured them to separate "core platform revenue" from "expansion-market revenue," making the risk/reward trade-offs immediately scannable to an investor audience. The CFO adopted the format for subsequent investor communications and asked me for enough Figma training to edit the files himself.
- CRO regulatory communications. I suggested visualising our eight-regulatory-update track record as a "compliance maturity curve" rather than eight isolated incidents — reframing the same evidence as a systematic capability rather than reactive firefighting.
Specifics of these deliverables are confidential; detail available in interview.
Senior design isn't just about the interface anymore — it's about being the person in the room who can translate between audiences. A trader, a CEO, a CFO, an auditor, an institutional investor all want the same underlying truth, but each needs it in their own vocabulary and at their own level of abstraction. When I arrived I could only speak "trader." Now I can move between these audiences, and the same design discipline — hierarchy, clarity, honest framing — travels with me.
Currently — mid-2026
I'm still at ACY, and the title now reads Senior Product Designer — the promotion landed in January 2026, four years in, after the scope had already moved to design-lead tier. The design-team rebuild has its first hire — she joined May 4, 2026 and came through her two-week ramp on the self-service enablement system I built. Current work spans the mobile app's next major release, ongoing compliance maintenance across all five platforms, and the investor-communications track with leadership. Project-level detail is in the ACY case study; this page is the surrounding narrative.
Six beliefs I didn't hold when I arrived.
01 · Compliance
Regulatory rules are design specifications, not legal paperwork.
Designers who treat compliance as a gate at the end ship late and argue with legal. Designers who treat it as a design input from day one ship on time and have legal as an ally. In regulated finance, compliance UX is UX.
02 · Density
Density is not the problem. Unstructured density is.
A trader's screen is dense by necessity, not by accident. The job isn't to remove information; it's to make the existing information faster to parse. I learned this the hard way by pulling a redesign in 2022 — and I've never forgotten it.
03 · Metrics
Task-completion time is the wrong proxy for trading products.
A faster but less confident trading decision is a worse outcome. I now ask "how certain are you about this?" alongside completion time, and treat a confidence drop as a failure even if the speed number improved.
04 · Briefs
A brief is a hypothesis, not a specification.
In 2022 I was briefed to redesign the Finlogix homepage. Three days in, the data told me the drop-off wasn't on the homepage — it was three screens deep, in the analysis workflow. I pushed back with evidence, the PM changed the brief, and the work that followed is what moved the metric.
05 · Teams
Design systems are what save you when the team isn't there.
I built the ACY system for a team of four. It saved the product when I was a team of one. A good design system is load-bearing infrastructure, not decoration.
06 · Audience
The discipline travels; the vocabulary changes.
Designing a compliance flow for a first-time trader and a pitch deck for an institutional investor are — underneath — the same problem. Both audiences want the truth, clearly presented, at their level of abstraction. Learning to move between them is what moved me from "product designer" to "senior" in my own head years before the title caught up — which, in January 2026, it did.
Each of these has its own case study.
This page is the personal narrative. The project pages are where the design work lives — problem framing, artefacts, outcomes, trade-offs. If a specific platform is what you're here for, the case studies are below.
ACY Securities →
The parent case study: design-system architecture across the full ecosystem. 150+ components, 5 platforms, 8+ regulatory updates absorbed without structural rework. The overview everything else branches from.
Finlogix →
Real-time market-data terminal. Density redesign, modular widget system, 40% analysis-time reduction in production telemetry. The product where I learned the "unstructured density" lesson the hard way.
LogixPanel →
Internal tool for compliance officers. Forty-jurisdiction audit prep that used to take two weeks, reworked to take hours. The CRM that taught me to design for the person doing the unglamorous work.
LogixTrader →
The web trading terminal retail traders use daily. A white-label (infrastructure borrowed from a third party, branded as ours) architecture decision that got us to market in eight months instead of two years.
ACYverse →
The gamification research project. Where I mapped the line between "educational" engagement mechanics and "inducement" mechanics that would trigger ASIC scrutiny. Includes a live compliance simulator.
ACY Connect →
The institutional side: FIX-protocol API platform and documentation for hedge funds and prop desks. The work that taught me to design for developers reading specs at 2am, not just traders clicking screens.
Reading-order suggestion. Short on time? Read the ACY parent case study first. Evaluating a specific capability — retail UX, institutional infrastructure, compliance design, consumer mobile — the platform that fits is probably the one linked above.
Where this is heading
Why I stayed — and why I'm now moving
Ten years, from a translation booth to a regulated-finance design system. Staying at ACY this long prompts a question from every recruiter: why haven't you left? And now the symmetric one: why are you finally leaving? Both answers are honest and live in the same paragraph.
The problem kept getting more interesting. I joined ACY as a mid-level designer on a fragmented product; I'm moving on having shipped a compliance design system that absorbs regulatory updates the way a shock absorber absorbs a bump. That's not a project I could have moved into from outside, and it's the reason I didn't leave for an adjacent role two years ago when I could have.
The work widened in ways I didn't expect. A designer who has only shipped consumer apps is a consumer designer. A designer who has shipped retail, institutional, mobile, API documentation, investor materials, and brand identity across many years — after starting in an interpreter's booth and a studio that didn't survive a trade war — is a different kind of professional: one who has reasoned about the same trade-offs from very different seats.
What changed. In January 2026 the title finally moved — promoted to Senior Product Designer, four years in, after the scope had already been at design-lead tier for years. That promotion is the validation, not the destination. Hiring, ramping, defending the system in front of the board, holding the regulatory line through eight rewrites is Lead-and-above scope, and the natural next step is the role that names it. The next employer gets a proven Senior PD already operating at design-lead scope — and formalises it into a Principal, Design Lead, Head of Design, or Founding Design Engineer seat.
The problems I want next: institutional-grade portfolio risk, execution infrastructure, compliance-first design, and AI-augmented financial workflows, at firms where these are the core of the business. Geographically that means the US and Europe — and in Asia-Pacific, the two markets where the record maps most directly: Australia (four years inside an ASIC-regulated AFSL holder is near-zero regulatory ramp-up) and Japan / Tokyo, where I've shipped consumer products first-hand. If that's your firm, the case studies tell you what I can do; this page tells you why I'd take it seriously.