Andy Wilson
Andy Wilson
Head of Design
Closing the gap between design and engineering
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Design leader with over 10 years across frontend engineering and product design. Having started as a developer, I build design functions that work closely with engineering, from operating models and design systems to prototyping in code. I'm looking for a leadership role where design helps shape product strategy.
Areas of expertise
- Scaling design teams and operating models
- Design strategy and product planning
- Design engineering and AI workflows
- Design systems and component libraries
Experience
B2B SaaS for the regulated London insurance market. Leading design for the core product, with 7 direct reports across the UK and Spain, reporting to the Chief Engineering Officer.
- Grew the design team from 3 to 8 (5 direct hires), owning headcount and budget, and established how it runs: a career framework, design critiques, 1:1s with growth plans and team rituals, with 3 promotions and 100% retention.
- Moved design from a downstream service into a core function that partners with product and commercial leadership on the roadmap and reviews work before build.
- Redesigned core user workflows, with better tools for managing work and clearer visibility of tasks across teams. The latest release, a dashboard redesign, cut related support tickets by 40%, with negative feedback from only 0.4% of users.
- Started shifting the team towards design engineering, using Claude Code with Figma and the design system to explore concepts, prototype and build flows. Concept-to-prototype time has dropped from days to hours.
- Built the design system with engineering, from tokens and governance to a Storybook component library. Designing new solutions now takes around a fifth of the time.
- Set up the company's first customer research practice: a UX panel, surveys, in-person usability sessions around every major UI release, and an internal UX agent powered by Copilot.
Mobile platform for scheduling, managing and reporting on frontline operations, used across rail, facilities and cleaning.
- Led mobile product design and reworked user flows and interaction patterns so complex workflows worked on small screens.
- Designed directly in code, building feature workflows in Angular that engineering merged straight into the main codebase. This removed the spec handoff.
- Mentored and coached frontend developers to improve the design and user experience of the product.
- Refactored legacy layout components to bring consistency across the web and mobile products.
Digital agency building websites and e-commerce for timber and building supplies merchants. Worked across design and frontend development.
- Designed and built large e-commerce platforms handling complex inventory, ordering and bulk pricing.
- Owned work end to end, from wireframes and high-fidelity UI to production frontend code.
- Built reusable component structures that kept client sites fast and easy to manage after launch.
Designed and built custom websites for a range of clients, from concept to deployment.