Building the platform, system, and design function behind Lens

Wood Mackenzie brought me in during May 2018 to help kickstart a major digital transformation programme. I joined as the first UI designer on Lens, a new flagship platform intended to unify multiple legacy products, modernise the user experience, and help customers work across connected datasets and markets more easily.

At that point, there was no real design precedent for the product: only a rough concept, early prototype work, and a small engineering effort. Over the next four years, my role evolved from designing the first product foundations to shaping the design system, holding coherence across six to seven product teams, and eventually leading the wider product design function as Director of Product Design.

Designing Lens from zero

Lens was created to solve a structural problem. Customers often had to move between multiple Wood Mackenzie products with different interfaces, datasets, and mental models. That made it hard to answer broader questions across markets, even when the data existed inside the business.

My early work focused on turning that ambition into a usable product experience. I set the initial UI direction for Lens, particularly around data-heavy workflows involving maps, charts, tables, search, and filtering. A key part of the challenge was helping users navigate complex and imperfectly aligned datasets without losing clarity.

Building Hydrocarbon

As the platform grew, I helped lay the foundations of what became Hydrocarbon, Lens’s internal design system. Working closely with engineering, I defined the core tokens, type, spacing, colour, grid, navigation patterns, chart styles, tables, forms, and reusable components that allowed the product to scale more coherently. I also helped establish the early governance around how the system should be used, extended, and shared across a growing design organisation.

That system lived in both code and design tooling, giving the wider team a shared language for building a highly complex data platform.

Holding coherence at scale

By the time I became Principal Product Designer in October 2019, the challenge had shifted from designing one product area to holding coherence across a fast-growing organisation. I became the most senior individual contributor in a design team that eventually grew to 11 designers, spanning six to seven product teams across a wider product organisation of around 100 people.

My role moved upward: mentoring designers, shaping higher-level design architecture, supporting hiring, introducing clearer ways of working, and making sure the product continued to feel like one platform rather than a set of separate initiatives.

Leading the function

In August 2021, I was promoted to Director of Product Design, taking on full leadership of the team during a difficult hiring market. I managed the design organisation, restructured how designers were allocated across the business, and created a clearer model of senior oversight across the main product areas of Discovery, Modelling, and Markets.

Alongside that, I continued to lead workshops, research, and customer conversations. My work included direct sessions with customers and development partners across the US, helping test ideas, validate workflows, and shape product decisions in close collaboration with the market. The bar was high: Wood Mackenzie’s products were used by 10 of the top 10 investment banks, alongside hundreds of the world’s leading utilities, developers, and IPPs.

Outcome

My work at Wood Mackenzie helped turn Lens from an early transformation concept into the company’s flagship product, while also establishing the design foundations and team structure needed to scale it. The result was not just a more coherent platform, but a more mature design function that could support complex product development across the business.