Led the UX discipline across three digital products, serving 950+ clients in Education and Aged Care. I established and scaled UX processes, mentored designers, introduced UX research, and launched the company’s first design system. I also bridged collaboration across distributed teams in Australia, Malaysia, and the UK.
Head of UX at CompliSpace
Established and led the UX discipline from the ground up across three digital products.
Built and mentored a growing UX team, managed cross-functional collaboration with Product Managers, Engineers, and Executive Leadership.
Advocated for UX at a strategic level, aligning user needs with business goals.
Project Duration & Phases
3 Years (Full-Time Role)
My Project Toolkit
Notion – Documentation
Figma – Design & Handover
Miro – Workshop facilitation
Confluence – Collaboration
Jira – Task Management
Teams – Communication
Key Deliverables & Outcomes
Helix Design System: First-ever scalable and accessible design system across products.
5-Stage UX Process: Discovery, Research, Ideation, Design, Validation – adopted across teams.
Project management, designed and delivered multiple feature upgrades across CompliSpace's suite of digital platforms
Designed high-fidelity prototypes used in 1:1 and beta usability testing
As Head of UX at CompliSpace, I led the user experience strategy across all three of the company’s digital products, which serve over 950 clients in the Education and Aged Care sectors across Australia. Over my three-year tenure I established and scaled the UX discipline within the organization, embedding user-centred design principles into product development, ensuring a seamless alignment between business objectives and customer needs. My leadership extended beyond design execution—I played a pivotal role in shaping UX strategy, driving innovation, and fostering a high-performing, collaborative environment across multiple disciplines. A core aspect of my role was facilitating cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that Product Managers, Customer Service teams, Software Engineer, UX and UI designers worked cohesively toward a shared vision.
As CompliSpace is part of a global company family I was responsible for coordinating teams and projects across multiple time zones. I streamlined communication and optimized workflows between developers in Kuala Lumpur and designers in the UK by establishing formal ways of working and collaboration tools, enabling efficient problem solving, design execution and delivery. My ability to bridge technical and design disciplines, advocate for UX at an executive level, and implement structured processes has had a lasting impact on both product quality and team efficiencies. By balancing strategic oversight with hands-on UX expertise, I have demonstrated my ability to lead high-impact initiatives that drive business growth, operational efficiency, and produce exceptional user experiences.
As Head of UX, I was responsible for managing and mentoring junior UX designers, ensuring their workloads were effectively prioritized, organized, and aligned with project goals. My leadership involved strategic task delegation as well as providing UX guidance to maintain a high standard of design output while supporting team members in their professional growth. I endeavoured to structure the workload efficiently but working backwards from feature release and/or development timelines to ensure designers had adequate time to explore, prototype, test where necessary, and refine their work. This enabled the team to create innovative solutions whilst still feeling confident they were able to meet deadlines and deliver high-quality UX solutions that aligned with both user needs and business objectives.
A key part of my leadership approach was fostering cross-functional collaboration between UX designers, Product Managers, and Software Engineers. I actively participated in discussions and meetings with junior designers and key stakeholders to stay across project developments and help unblock any challenges and/or provide UX guidance. My presence in these interactions allowed me to provide UX expertise, resolve miscommunications, and address technical concerns early in the process. Given that many of these stakeholders were also distributed across multiple time zones, I also had to effectively coordinate communication across teams in Australia, Malaysia, and the UK, ensuring alignment despite geographic and time differences.
This proactive involvement ensured smoother workflows, reduced friction between teams, and facilitated efficient project progress while cultivating a strong, collaborative design culture. Beyond day-to-day management, I established and documented structured design workflows to enhance both individual and collaborative processes within the team. These frameworks provided clear checkpoints, improved communication, and reduced inefficiencies by identifying and resolving gaps in existing workflows. By implementing these structured processes, we saw a measurable reduction in project blockers and faster design-to-development turnaround times. Leading and optimizing these UX initiatives reinforced my ability to drive efficiency, streamline operations, and elevate the impact of UX within the organization, ensuring that both designers and stakeholders worked seamlessly toward shared goals.
As Head of UX Design at CompliSpace, I introduced a structured and strategic approach to UX by implementing a five-stage UX process that outlined the end-to-end design journey. This framework detailed each phase—Discovery, Research, Ideation, Design, and Validation—highlighting key deliverables, critical considerations, and UX methodologies to be applied at each stage. By formalizing this process, I not only created a clear roadmap for UX execution but also provided a transparent way for stakeholders to understand the discipline and identify when and where the UX team should be involved. This clarity significantly improved cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that UX was embedded at the right moments in the product development lifecycle, rather than as an afterthought.In addition to shaping UX strategy, I played a pivotal role in establishing the UX research discipline at CompliSpace. Under my leadership, the company conducted its first-ever user research interviews and usability sessions, bringing valuable user insights and key metrics into the product development process. These initiatives allowed us to make data-driven decisions, leading to more intuitive and effective user experiences. Furthermore, I introduced beta testing as a standard practice, ensuring that features were validated by real users before launch. This approach significantly improved product quality and reduced the risk of costly post-release refinements.
Collaboration was a cornerstone of my leadership, and I worked closely with product managers, UX/UI designers, and software engineers to create seamless cross-functional workflows. By establishing clear processes from the discovery phase—where UX and engineering collaborated to assess the technical feasibility of design solutions—through to development, I ensured efficient and well-structured handovers. This process improved alignment between teams, streamlined the transition from design to build, and minimized gaps between UX intent and final implementation.One of my most impactful contributions was leading the introduction of Helix, CompliSpace’s first-ever design system. This initiative transformed the way our products were designed, developed, and maintained.
Helix not only unified the look and feel across our suite of products, enhancing visual consistency and user familiarity, but also improved accessibility by standardizing reusable, scalable components. For our teams, the design system streamlined design and development time, reducing inefficiencies and ensuring consistency across platforms. The benefits of Helix extended beyond design—it became a foundational tool that improved usability for end users and efficiency for internal teams, as outlined in the detailed case study. Throughout my time as Head of UX at CompliSpace I operationalized UX processes, aligned cross-functional goals with clear UX deliverables and ensured smooth collaboration across teams. By embedding UX within structured workflows and fostering a culture of research and iteration, I helped create not only more user-friendly and intuitive digital products but also a more efficient and enjoyable working process for all stakeholders involved.
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As Head of UX at CompliSpace, I worked closely with a wide range of stakeholders, ensuring UX was deeply embedded within the product development lifecycle and aligned with business objectives. My role required ongoing collaboration with Product Managers, Senior Software Engineers, Marketing teams, and Executive Leadership, ensuring that UX was not only a design function but a strategic driver of product success.From a strategic perspective, I worked closely with Product Managers, the Head of Technology, and Executive Leadership to shape product release roadmaps that prioritized user-centred features. This involved aligning business objectives with user needs, advocating for UX-driven improvements, and ensuring feasibility within the company’s technical and operational constraints. More granularly, I collaborated weekly—if not daily—with Product Managers to discuss, design, and prioritize platform and user needs ensuring that upcoming feature designs were informed by research, usability insights, and UX principles.
Additionally, I made sure from the beginning I established and fostered strong working relationships with senior engineers, confirming technical feasibility was considered early in the design process and helping to resolve any design-related development blockers. This ensured that roadmaps, deadlines, and release targets were confidently met. Beyond product and engineering, I also worked at connecting Marketing and the UX design team to establish timelines and resources for feature release communications—including contributing to UX content writing where necessary—to ensure a clear, consistent and friendly message to our users.
A key part of my role was securing buy-in for UX initiatives and ensuring that user needs were effectively represented in product roadmaps. By leveraging user research insights, usability testing data, and industry best practices, I was able to advocate for and influence the inclusion of UX research, iterative design, and development of new product features that balanced business objectives with user experience improvements. This required working closely with executive leadership and product teams to articulate the value of UX in tangible business terms—such as user retention, engagement, and operational efficiency—while ensuring that design and development timelines remained realistic and achievable.
Beyond daily collaboration, I also played a critical role in mediating conflicts and improving alignment across teams. One of the most significant challenges we faced was the UX/UI handover process to developers, which often led to inefficiencies due to unclear documentation, gaps in communication, and misaligned expectations between designers and engineers. To address this, I facilitated a structured alignment initiative:
Senior Stakeholder Alignment. I first conducted a high-level meeting with senior leadership and key stakeholders (including Product and Tech leads) to understand foundational concerns, workflow inefficiencies, and their preferences for an improved process.
Development Team Collaboration: I then ran a dedicated alignment session with the entire Kuala Lumpur development team to gather their input on requirements, preferences, and pain points in the handover process.
Process Documentation & Workflow Strategy: Using insights from both sessions, I developed a step-by-step workflow strategy that outlined the entire UX-to-development pipeline—from product manager requirements through UX design, handover, development, testing, and final release.
Meeting Checkpoints & Communication Channels: To enhance ongoing collaboration, I introduced clear meeting checkpoints at critical stages and implemented dedicated communication channels via Microsoft Teams and structured Confluence spaces to facilitate open dialogue between designers and developers.
The outcome of this initiative was a far smoother, more efficient handover and development process, reducing friction and misunderstandings. Developers had fewer unanswered questions, fewer blockers, and ultimately moved faster, while the number of bugs and design-related issues found during development was significantly reduced. By proactively addressing process inefficiencies, I was able to enhance cross-functional collaboration, improve team dynamics, and create a more seamless and productive working environment.Ultimately, my leadership in stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration reinforced a user-first yet business-aligned approach to product development, ensuring that UX was not just a function but a core pillar in delivering successful, high-quality digital products.
As Head of UX at CompliSpace, I strengthened my leadership, collaboration, and user experience design skills by championing and embedding the UX discipline across the organization. The impact of my work is reflected in the key achievements outlined below, showcasing how I helped shape and elevate UX within the company.
When I joined CompliSpace, UX was not formally established. I took the initiative to define and integrate UX best practices, embedding it as a core function in product development. I developed structured processes, frameworks, and workflows to align UX with business strategy while serving as a key liaison between product, executive leadership, and technology teams. By championing UX-driven decision-making and fostering cross-functional alignment, I transformed how digital products were designed, developed, and released.
Prior to my leadership, CompliSpace had never conducted formal UX research. I established structured UX research practices within the company, introducing methodologies such as user interviews, usability testing, and beta testing to bring real user feedback into the product development lifecycle. This shift allowed us to move from assumption-based decision-making to data-driven design, significantly improving the usability and effectiveness of our products. The introduction of research also influenced product roadmaps, helping teams prioritize features that directly addressed user pain points while balancing business goals. By embedding research into our workflows, I ensured that user insights became an integral part of how CompliSpace built and evolved its digital products.
One of my most impactful contributions was creating and launching Helix, CompliSpace’s first design system. It unified the company’s suite of products, improving consistency, usability, and scalability. By implementing reusable components, Helix streamlined design and development processes, reducing inefficiencies, accelerating time to market, and enhancing overall product quality with user feedback highlighting it became more “user friendly”, ‘intuitive” and “modern”. It also fostered better collaboration between UX, UI, and development teams with smoother workflows and interface development. As a cornerstone of CompliSpace’s product evolution, Helix significantly improved both internal efficiency and the user experience at scale.Through these initiatives, I transformed UX at CompliSpace from anon-existent discipline into an essential, structured function that significantly improved team collaboration, product quality, and overall business outcomes.
My vision for leading innovative, cohesive, and efficient UX teams is grounded in three core values. By fostering and championing these principles, I believe I can build and lead strong, high-performing teams.
Humility: Great UX design requires a low-ego approach, self-awareness, and respect— not only of their won attitudes and work, but of other key stakeholders throughout the process. Designers must prioritise user needs, business goals, and technical constraints over personal attachments to their solutions. To be self-aware and detached from your work allows you to more readily adapt it to meet new requirements or potential solutions available (hello AI!). Similarly, by respecting one’s work and teammates this can lead to more thoughtful design decisions and stronger outcomes.
Ambition UX designers are at heart eager problem solvers, driven by curiosity and a desire to tackle complex challenges. I strive to lead a design team where keenness to understand the root cause/s, and solve complex problems is encouraged and rewarded! It is through instilling a value such as ambition as well provides designers with the opportunity to explore new solutions such as AI, and therefore to also be at the forefront of the digital space.
Collaboration: A team of exceptional UX designers cannot succeed in isolation. The most effective and innovative design outcomes result from strong cross-functional collaboration. I strongly believe leading an efficient and innovative UX discipline includes facilitating strong and frequent collaboration with Product Managers and Software Engineers in particular, as well as customer success teams and/or marketing where appropriate. In my experience, the most holistic solutions emerge from open knowledge-sharing with subject matter experts, often streamlining and enriching the design process and solution. This is why I prioritize structured collaboration, such as weekly WIPs, where I lead discussions to surface key questions, action items, and milestones.I have found myself to quickly establish myself, and flourish within the role of Head of UX thoroughly enjoying practicing and developing my already strong organisational and collaborative skillset. My vision for my own career is to continue down the pathway of leading efficient, inclusive, sustainable and innovative design teams.
