My work sits where design strategy meets measurable impact. I build and scale design teams, embed research and usability testing into how products get made, and create the design systems and standards that let an organisation raise its quality without slowing down. At Xceptor I lifted company-wide design maturity from "limited" to "structured" in three years; before that, at IDBS, I introduced the first usability practice to a company that had gone two decades without one.

The role reaches well beyond design. I work closely with Xceptor's Chief Product Officer and executive team on which product bets to make, grounded in years of direct conversations with clients, and I've authored much of the product strategy that goes to the board and investors. It's the part of the job I most want to grow, and why I'm as interested in senior product roles as in design leadership.

Increasingly, that work is about AI. I lead an AI-native design practice, using AI across research, prototyping, and design operations so a small team can work at a much larger scale, and I design how enterprise software adopts agentic AI without breaking the trust of the people who rely on it. My rule of thumb is simple: AI suggests, humans approve. In high-stakes work, that's what makes automation something people will adopt.

Across fraud prevention, life-sciences R&D, and financial process automation, the through-line is the same: complex, high-stakes software that people shouldn't need training to use. I care most about the unglamorous work that makes that real: research that finds the actual problem, systems that keep quality consistent, and measurement that proves a design is better, not just newer.

I write about all of this in my notes, and the portfolio goes deeper on a few projects.

Open to senior product and design roles. Get in touch at contact@alfiesimmons.com  ·  LinkedIn