I work closest to the people who build the product, and stay away from the finished pixel for as long as I can.

I joined ZF in 2023 on a ride-hailing booking app: the traveller app, native on iOS and Android, a little of the driver app, and the native iOS and Android design systems underneath. The Android one I built with a single engineer.

Today I own the mobile and touch branch of the design system behind the apps truck drivers use at work. The same components have to hold up in a workflow tool the driver reads while parked, with all the time in the world, and in a navigation app he gets a second to look at.

That navigation app is the other half of my work. For the past twelve months I’ve been the only designer on it, taken from the first sketch to release.

A driver gets one second with the screen, and there is no second attempt to learn from. So before a flow is built, I decide which events we will capture and what each one is meant to prove. Engineering wires them in; the question is mine. It forces the sentence most teams never write down: what would count as this working. We enter production with the measurement already in place, and the first field data feeds prioritisation the day it arrives.

Originality is not the objective. Being right the first time is. Where a proven pattern exists I adopt it rather than invent one, and back it with rigorous secondary research. The habit I’m adding now: writing down, before we build, what would make us abandon an idea, while it is still a test and not a justification.