THE CONTEXT
When I arrived, UX was not a function. Designers were taking tickets, not shaping products. Within weeks, a merger reshaped the org, and I was asked to design an AI case management platform without an established UX practice, process, or product direction.
At the time UX was not really a function. Designers were taking tickets, not shaping products. This was not a clean starting point.
The scope grew from one to four products, one of which was maintaining a legacy platform called NetReveal. Multiple products being built in parallel, and the merger introducing different cultures and ways of working, and a business pivoting from services to SaaS all at once.
Nothing stayed stable for long.
7
designers hired
10+
UX Council members per product
1→5
products in 3 years
AI bolt-on →AI-Native
team mindset shift
THE CHALLENGE
The organisation had been operating as a services business. Products were built based on client requests. UX happened after decisions were made.
Designers acted as delivery support. There was no UX function or research practice, limited planning and heavy delivery focus, constant organisational change, and pressure to deliver AI products without clear direction.
I too was also learning a completely new domain from scratch. Compliance. AML, Fraud, Sanctions and KYC.
None of it was familiar.
'Nimi, you put UX on the map at SymphonyAI'
Jason Shane | Head of Innovation and Strategy
HOW I LED
Feeling extremely grateful after pitching to become Head of UX, I leaned on my years of working with amazing design leaders to guide me, and of course my line manager, peers from FLUX (Female leads in UX), and sometimes my gut instinct ... through it all I realised I became the leader I always needed.
Building the culture
When I started there were two designers working independently and I was the third. I brought us together into a single function.
As the product scope expanded I hired and onboarded four more designers, growing the team to seven across four regions.
Then the business restructured. The team reduced back to three, and I was one of those three.
But now, we were responsible for five products. That shift forced a clarity I had not needed before. I had to make sharp calls about what moved things forward, what could wait, and what simply did not matter enough to fight for.
Losing team members you hired and developed is one of the hardest parts of leadership nobody talks about.
'She created an environment where everyone felt valued and supported'
Saudin Ceric, HelloFresh
Cross-functional influence
I created the UX Council, a small group that brought together BAs, engineers, pre-sales, professional services and managed services for each product.
Around ten participants for each product. We created the customer access we could not get externally, internally.
It became the backbone of how we validated and aligned work.
I also rebuilt the relationship between UX and Product from a handoff model to genuine early collaboration and pushed for UXers visiting customers alongside PMs, something that simply was not happening before.
'She brought colleagues and different teams together to collaborate and share ideas'
Sathpal Singh - Natwest
Growing people
My approach to development has always been: demonstrate first, then collaborate, then hand over and support.
I trained my team on how to articulate their design decisions with confidence and made a point of ensuring they presented their own work rather than letting PMs speak for it.
I adopted a skills matrix with my Director of UX to track and support team growth and delivered workshop training and feature prioritisation sessions for both UXers and PMs.
'Her leadership style creates an environment where designers can grow, learn and deliver their best work'
Oksana Oleniuk, Avenga
THE STRATEGY
My strategy evolved over time and even more so as more and more AI tools were becoming available in the market to enhance how we work.
I'm deliberately using the word enhance and not accelerate, we can discuss this if you like?
1.
UX Maturity and foundations
-
Move from ad-hoc tactical design to strategic partner.
-
Build a repository of insights, personas and journeys
-
Define success via adoption, satisfaction and task success.
-
Standardise discovery, delivery and validation practices.
2.
Customer Centricity
-
Prioritise core users including engineers, investigators and data stewards
-
Continuous discovery and usability testing
-
Insiders programme for validating new features with real users (this was parked due to ... well a lot of reasons)
-
UX council for validating features with internal SMEs across teams and regions.
3.
AI-Enabled UX collaboration
-
Use AI where it clearly improves speed, quality or insight, not by default.
-
Define clear roles for AI vs designers across discovery, design and validation.
-
Embed AI into existing UX processes without disrupting how teams work.
-
Ensure outputs are reviewed, challenged and refined.
-
Create guidance on when and how to use AI to ensure consistency and quality.
4.
Team and Culture
-
Shared tools and rituals across pods
-
Embed UX in PM and Engineering planning
-
Share UX insights internally and promote customer empathy across the organisation
THE MOMENTS THAT MATTERED
Of course with hindsight I can look back and agree with my peers and mentors, I was mad but as my therapist often reminds me, growth isn't all sunshine and roses.
01
The all-hands
The organisation had never really understood what UX was or why it mattered. Very early on I was invited to present as the 'spotlight' at a global all-hands.
I introduced UX as a discipline to an organisation that had never formally encountered it. I genuinely didn't read too much into it, I was there to bust some myths about what we actually do using the UX paradox illustration (the rocket ship one), which landed well.
I also consciously made a request to the whole organisation... paraphrasing myself - "expect us (the UX team) to reach out, because most of you have decades of domain expertise that we need"
The reaction buttons came out. Direct messages came in from people I had never spoken to. And then my phone rang! The CEO called personally to thank me.
That was the moment I knew the culture was starting to shift.
02
The lighthouse customer
Early on we had the chance to work with a flagship customer. It should have been a win. It was not.
We were designing into ambiguity. Alignment with the product and engineering team was not where it needed to be and the engagement did not land the way it should have.
I took that seriously. It reshaped how I approached every stakeholder relationship afterwards. Less assumption. More verification. Earlier and more often.
03
AI Slop to Ship
When vibe coding started producing low quality output across engineering teams, I worked with the Product Director to create a framework. Not to discourage the enthusiasm for vibe coding but to channel it.
Quality gates that ensured anything vibe coded would be reviewed, challenged and refined before it shipped. It came out of research into existing frameworks, consolidated into one.
Unfortunately I was made redundant before we had a chance to pilot it.
04
Staying through the hard bits
*Takes a deep breath in - In the space of 3 years, we underwent a business transformation, had 3 CEOs, underwent 2 org restructures. I've just consolidate three pensions. Established a UX team and function starting with 3 growing to 7 and then back down to 3. That's 7 designers on 1 product to three designers across five products. We moved on to designing with AI embedded in the workflow while trying to stay on top of the continuously changing landscape of AI and tools, and two waves of redundancies. I was part of the most recent wave, made redundant in March 2026. *and exhale
Through all of it I leaned on mentors, my line manager and a community of female UX leads (Flux) who kept me sane for the most part. Everyone thought I was mad for staying as long as I did. They were probably right. But they gave me the emotional support I needed to keep going through something that was genuinely hard.
05
The AI turning point
A new CEO joined and asked a direct question that changed everything: (paraphrasing) why are we an AI company with so little meaningful AI in our products?
He asked me to benchmark three of our products against direct and indirect competitors. I used AI tools to find them, analysed the gaps, and presented back.
That conversation reframed how my designers approached their work. I asked them to put on their AI lens. Not to think about copilot features bolted onto the side of a product, but to ask what problems could genuinely be solved with AI. We went on to designing with AI embedding into the workflow.
That shift wasn't just a design decision. It was a product philosophy change.
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The organisation had been operating as a services business. Products were built based on client requests. UX happened after decisions were made.
Designers acted as delivery support. There was no UX function or research practice, limited planning and heavy delivery focus, constant organisational change, and pressure to deliver AI products without clear direction.
I too was also learning a completely new domain from scratch. Compliance. AML, Fraud, Sanctions and KYC.
None of it was familiar
WHAT WE BUILT
SRI - Sensa Risk Intelligence Platform
Always-on Compliance and Risk Intelligence.
The vision for SRI was to support financial institutions go from reactive to proactive risk management and orchestrate end-to-end workflows coordinating multiple agents and human checkpoints
Sense Data
A data pipeline platform that enables data engineers to map, transform and deploy financial data at scale. Reducing customer onboarding time from 6 months (sometimes over a year) to weeks.
Sense Detections
Model governance and ML ops engine that enables banks to monitor, test and deploy new detection rules in days rather than 6 to 12 months.
Sense Investigations
A fully Agentic case management platform. Started with AI as a bolt-on and evolved into an end-to-end AI-native workflow. Reducing time on investigations by up to 60%
AI Insights
A dashboard and reporting feature that reduces the time and effort of monitoring and reporting for financial crime teams.
Scale doesn't equal maturity. A product with hundreds of customers can still have never validated a concept. Always assess the product organisation with the same rigour you would apply to a product.
Culture change is slow and rarely linear. You won't win every battle. Focus on where you have influence, celebrate the small wins, and trust that consistency compounds.
The best design question is rarely "what should we build?" It's "what does this enable our users to do?" That reframe has unlocked more conversations than any framework I've ever used.
Leadership is influence, not authority. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is stay consistent when everything around you is shifting.
For my first ever official Head of UX role, I can say I did it. Was it perfect? No. But my best lessons have come from the things that did not work.
Would I do it again? Let's see where the wind takes me next.
WHAT I LEARNED