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For +1 year, I led end-to-end design on a mission-critical search platform used daily by thousands of domain experts; orchestrating research, definition, design and handoff across a team of 4 designers, within a Scrum framework.
Evidence-led iteration shaped navigation, document viewing, and metadata flows, resulting in clearer, faster, more traceable workflows powered by a consistent, scalable Design System.
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A major European supranational organisation, one that operates across 38+ member states and manages one of the world's largest specialised document repositories, relied on a complex application as the primary daily tool for its expert workforce.
These users perform high-stakes, precision-intensive tasks: analysing, comparing, and evaluating large volumes of highly technical documentation as part of a legally consequential process.
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Scale context
The platform serves thousands of domain experts across Europe, processing queries against a repository of millions of specialised documents. For these users, the platform is not a convenience; it is the primary instrument of their professional work. Every hour of friction at this scale compounds into significant lost productivity and quality risk across the organisation.
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The challenge was not to rebuild from scratch, but to elevate the end-to-end experience across several interconnected areas, without losing coherence with parallel product initiatives or with an established corporate Design System**.**
Incremental improvement at this level of complexity requires a fundamentally different discipline than greenfield design: every decision touches legacy patterns, technical constraints, and the deeply ingrained workflows of expert users.
I was brought in as Lead Product Designer, acting as design lead for a team of 4 and as the primary bridge between business stakeholders, product management, and engineering, within an active Scrum delivery framework.
| Responsibility | Description |
|---|---|
| Design leadership | Setting design direction, making interaction and system decisions, ensuring quality and coherence across all 4 team members and multiple parallel workstreams. |
| Research orchestration | Planning and running a mixed-methods research programme — interviews, workshops, and quantitative surveys — to generate evidence that drove backlog priorities. |
| Design System governance | Maintaining coherence with the corporate Design System, proposing extensions where necessary, and preventing pattern divergence across parallel search initiatives. |
| Engineering bridge | Reducing implementation ambiguity through precise specs, annotated handoff, and Jira traceability — ensuring what was designed was what got built. |
| Stakeholder alignment | Facilitating cross-team alignment across concurrent search workstreams to avoid duplication and maintain systemic coherence. |
Four strategic fronts defined the scope: