Building more than a design team

EV charging is a technically complex domain. The platform touches hardware, energy management, roaming protocols, billing, and multi-country regulation, often all at once. Design decisions rarely exist in isolation. A change to one flow can have consequences across the system that are not immediately obvious.

When I joined, there was one designer on the team. The product was growing, but design was not keeping up. Work was reactive, responding to feature requests rather than shaping product direction. There was limited consistency across domains, and design was rarely involved early enough to influence the decisions that mattered.

The task was to change that: build a team, put the right conditions in place, and move design from execution to a function that could genuinely contribute to how the product evolved.

I grew the design team from one to six. That meant hiring product designers, a UX writer, and a UX researcher: building a function that could cover the full range of what good product design actually requires, not just the visual layer.

But building a team is about more than headcount. It is about setting standards, creating a shared sense of what good looks like, and making sure people have the space and the tools to do their best work.

Alongside hiring, I set up a design system that gave the team a common foundation to work from. This was not just about visual consistency. It was about reducing friction, speeding up decision-making, and making it easier for design and engineering to speak the same language.

The central initiative during this period was the NextGen platform: an internal programme to evolve the existing LMS product into a more scalable, future-proof system. The legacy setup had served the business well, but growth and increasing complexity in the EV market had exposed its limits. NextGen was the opportunity to rebuild with more intentionality: modular architecture, separated domains, and a product structure that could support multiple markets and user types without fragmenting.

My role was to connect that technical ambition to coherent user experiences. Platform thinking is easy to describe in architecture diagrams. It is much harder to translate into something that feels consistent and navigable to an operator managing charging infrastructure across multiple sites and countries. I was hands-on in that translation work, while also making sure the team had the structure and direction to contribute meaningfully.

Building the team was one part of the work. The other was raising the maturity of how design operated inside the organisation. That meant clearer ownership within the team, more consistent ways of working between design, product, and engineering, and better visibility of design earlier in the process, before the space to change direction had closed.

Some of this was process. But a lot of it was about mindset. Moving from thinking about screens and features to thinking about user flows and system-level behaviour. Getting teams to question the brief before jumping to solutions, and to see design as part of how the product gets defined, not just how it gets delivered.

Over the course of the engagement, the organisation built a design function that could operate at the pace and complexity the business needed. The team grew from one to six, with clear roles, shared standards, and a design system to work from. Alignment between design, product, and engineering improved noticeably. The NextGen platform gave the product a clearer structure and a more coherent foundation for growth.

By the end of the engagement, design was involved earlier, the team had stronger ownership of its work, and the organisation had the conditions in place to keep that going.