Senior Product Design Leader | Complex Platforms & Workflows
Case Study
Acuris (acquired by ION for £1.35bn) | Director of Product Design | Consulting | 2016 to 2019
Embedding design leadership across a 22-product global financial intelligence platform - unifying fragmented workflows, scaling design capability, and contributing to a £1.35bn acquisition.
Key Results
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£1.35bn acquisition by ION Group in 2019
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Editorial coordination time reduced by 60% via the Leads tool
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Publishing completeness improved by 40% via the Intelligence Tool
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Data capture time reduced by 75% via the Deals Tool
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22 products across 6 verticals unified under a shared design and discovery framework
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Design team grown from fragmented to a structured organisation of 10+
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Time-to-publication reduced by up to 80% across the content platform
Project Overview
My Role
Director of Product Design, embedded consultant - hired directly by the CTO
My Team
Grew a team of 10+ designers and design managers across multiple product verticals
The Challenge
Acuris (formerly Mergermarket Group) was a global financial media and data intelligence company with over 22 customer-facing products across six verticals. The internal product ecosystem had grown organically over years, resulting in deeply fragmented workflows, inconsistent design practices, and siloed development teams across London, New York, and Singapore. I was brought in to lead the unification of the internal product suite.
My Mandate
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Embed human-centred design into the product delivery lifecycle across all verticals
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Unify internal tool design under a shared framework and design language
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Build and scale the in-house design team
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Partner with C-suite and product leadership to shift the organisation from feature delivery to evidence-based, user-value outcomes
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I led design personally across all three key projects while simultaneously building the team and practice.
Tools & Methods
Sketch · Miro · Bootstrap · User Stories · Continuous Discovery · Usability Testing
Outcome of a Design workshop that I ran for Acuris, to understand pain-points in the product development process
Key Projects
1. The Leads Tool - Global Story Commissioning
The challenge
Journalists and editors across three continents were coordinating story leads through a patchwork of email, spreadsheets, and informal processes - creating duplication, missed opportunities, and significant editorial latency.
I facilitated co-creation workshops across London and New York to align stakeholders on a shared vision, then personally designed the end-to-end workflow, information architecture, and key interface components for a collaborative, cloud-based system for tracking and assigning editorial leads globally..
• Reduced editorial coordination time by 60%
• Established scalable design patterns reused across subsequent tools
• Created a proof-of-concept prototype validated through user testing before development began
Workflow diagrams and sketches from a collaborative drawing exercise during a stakeholder workshop facilitated by me
Process diagram and wireframe from the Leads PoC prototype produced for user testing by me
2. The Intelligence Tool - AI-Enhanced CMS
The challenge
The core content production tool used across all Acuris products was inconsistent, slow, and heavily manual - creating bottlenecks in publishing and limiting the organisation's ability to scale content output.
I led and personally delivered the redesign of the Intelligence Tool from the ground up, introducing AI-assisted tagging and metadata workflows that dramatically improved accuracy and speed.
• Increased publishing completeness by 40%
• Laid the design foundation for Acuris' broader automation roadmap
• Balanced AI automation with editorial control - ensuring journalists remained confident and in command
Sketch Prototype for Intel Proof of Concept by me
Early Bootstrap prototype built to validate the interaction model
3. The Deals Tool - Financial Data Workflow
The challenge
Data entry and relationship tracking for financial analysts was redundant, inconsistent, and error-prone — with the same information captured multiple times across disconnected systems.
I reimagined the data entry and relationship tracking workflows end-to-end, delivering high-fidelity prototypes to validate the approach before development.
• Reduced data capture time by 75%
• Improved data consistency across systems
• Delivered a model for structured financial data workflows reused across subsequent tools
Deals Sketch Prototype - designed by me
Across all three projects I was the lead designer - setting direction, designing core flows and interfaces, and validating with users - while simultaneously building the team and practice that would sustain the work beyond my tenure.
4. Building the Design Organisation
In parallel with delivering these products, I partnered with the in-house Head of Design to build the design capability that would sustain them - providing the senior leadership layer, establishing the practice framework, and creating the conditions for the team to scale.
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Structured and grew a team of 10+ designers and design managers across multiple product verticals
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Introduced company-wide discovery, research, and critique practices
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Mentored designers across squads, building shared standards and design maturity
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Established design as a genuine cross-functional partner to product, data, and editorial leadership
The shift from a fragmented collection of individual designers to a coherent, collaborative design organisation was as significant as any single product outcome.
A Note on the Acquisition
Acuris was acquired by ION Group for £1.35bn in 2019. The unified, scalable internal product ecosystem we built - more efficient, more consistent, and better positioned for automation - was a meaningful contributor to the company's operational performance and acquisition value. The work done during my tenure directly improved the scalability and quality of the platform that ION acquired.