Good decisions span disciplines, and so do I.
Seventeen years across product strategy, design and front-end. I like to see the full picture, from business goals, through design, to production release.
My angle
I have a knack for joining the dots and thinking in systems, which lets me work across a product top to bottom, solving problems in holistic ways. I'd rather follow a problem across whatever lines it crosses than stop at the edge of my own patch.
I enjoy speaking with designers, developers and founders, in their own language, and finding the approach that plays to what each of them does best.
What I do
Whether it's untangling a roadmap, a one-off design piece or a UX audit, I'm interested in the solution that works best, not the one that's easiest to categorise.
Design: UX and UI, design systems, component libraries. I've designed platforms and products used by millions, at all scales, from startups to global brands.
Strategy: Scoping, roadmapping, prioritisation. What to build, what to leave, and what order to do it in for the greatest effect.
Front-end: I'm not an engineer for hire, but I spent a decade as a designer-developer, so I can read your codebase and tell you what's feasible before anyone's committed time to it.
SiteWalk
SiteWalk is a B2B SaaS tool, enabling multimodal data collection and analysis for the condition of commercial premises across everything from hospitality to transport to facilities management.
I lead product design, strategy and stakeholder comms, and a fair bit beyond. I also built the operating layer that runs much of the business through AI: a structured set of governance, context and tooling instructions that let an agent work in our Jira, CRM, roadmapping and reporting under direct human instruction, in a tightly coupled loop. Onboarding new client accounts is a near-instant process, and a monthly stakeholder roadmap that used to eat a day now takes around two hours, and can include enough information that it no longer requires a meeting to run through.
NewsNow
A popular news aggregator, running since 1997 with tens of millions of monthly uniques, and a front end that hadn't been meaningfully touched since 2007. I joined an engineering-led company as the sole designer, front-end developer, researcher and product strategist, reporting to the CEO and COO, and took it on as a full redesign and rebuild, implementing good process from the start.
Before I could design anything sensibly, I had to get deep into the structure of the product: a legacy Perl codebase and a custom CMS built by the principal engineer. I rebuilt the front end in Vue.js around a proper design system, and worked with the engineering team to rework the architecture so the front end and the CMS shared the same component structure top to bottom.
Research ran alongside from the beginning: the company's first programme in twenty-five years, 6,000+ responses across three continents, and multiple rounds of user interviews, which showed the one global product was really three regional ones. So rather than pick between a modern layout and the classic dense one, I built three. Reddit had tried something similar shortly before and triggered a user revolt, so I ran a deep case study of what went wrong and used it to shape a staged rollout, which brought millions of loyal users across without one.
Three and Tinder: "The Swipe is Right"
A campaign for Three and Tinder, a Henry VIII dating game built to drive competition entries. I designed and built it in Vue.js alongside a backend developer. 76% of the people who landed on it played it, and 54% went on to enter the competition.
Coravin
Internationalised product sites for a wine-technology company moving into new markets. There was almost no brand to work from, so I built modular, multi-language templates that scaled across each market and initialised the digital style guide that went on to grow with the brand.
AI with intention
I have a lot to say about AI, but I'll contain myself in the interest of (relative) brevity...
AI is a sharp tool, often used as a blunt one. I use it through a mix of closed and open-source tools, across all different product areas and beyond.
People talk about the need for a human in the loop, usually in terms of safety; preventing the AI from going off the rails. Turns out, keeping it on the rails is an imperative for using AI well, full stop. In this sense, it's less about human approval steps, and more about human guidance, nous, and comprehension. Working in tighter loops with smaller, more focused outputs is just good UX, whether it's me using AI as a tool, or a user interacting with AI-generated content in a product.
The north star of AI-powered applications, as I see it, is that the AI becomes invisible. It should sit quietly inside the experience, so the whole thing feels like a series of pleasant coincidences.
The real work is less about "prompting" the AI than governing it: writing the rules it operates under, grounded in what's actually being done and why, so its behaviour stays tied to the intent behind it.
Testimonials
[CEO quote. Speaks to outcomes and trust: he runs product, design and ops and I don't have to worry about it.]
[Investor-side quote. Speaks to judgement and commercial sense, not just craft.]
[Engineer quote. A senior engineer vouching that the technical side is genuinely real. This one does the heaviest lifting.]
What it costs
I price case by case, once I understand what you're actually dealing with, and I'd rather land on something that works for everyone.
If you're a charity, doing something I think is genuinely good, or you just really care about what you're building, get in touch and let's work it out.
About me
I've been building digital products since 2009. I started out in agencies, then made the move to internal teams on editorial platforms, and now I'm Product & Strategy Lead in an early-stage startup, running product, design and operations.
My multi-disciplinary approach stems from my own obsession with learning how things work, and systems thinking. Outside of work, I've gone down rabbit holes into 3D printing, a bit of electrical and mechanical engineering, and designing and building things like speakers and musical instruments. I had a decent run as a drum and bass producer, and I run a self-built community music studio every week in a youth club in Hackney.
Tell me what you're working on
Thirty minutes, no charge, and an honest answer on whether I can help.
hi@emilsmith.pro Get in touch