Leadership · Design practice
How I lead design
How I build teams, give design a real seat at the table, and measure what matters.
I lead the way I design: start with people, make the work visible, and measure whether it helped. Over 20 years I’ve built design teams from one person to ten, in regulated medical devices and enterprise software.
01
Build the team, then grow the people in it
At Philips PerformanceBridge, I started as the only designer and built a team of nine across the Netherlands and India.
As Head of Design for Emergency Care, I grew the team from 3 to 9 designers across 4 geographies in two years.
At Microsoft, I led 6–10 designers and researchers. A feedback framework I built raised thriving (“Signals”) scores by 6 points and favorability by 31%, with a 92% response rate. Coaching and clear accountability supported six promotions across two fiscal years.
02
Give design a seat in the process
Design only has influence if it’s built into how the business works. At Philips, I negotiated design’s place in the Product Realization Process and set up a Voice of the Customer process as formal design input.
At Microsoft, I built two operating tools. An intake process turned ad-hoc requests into a prioritized pipeline, from request through squad review, planning and leadership prioritization to delivery and review. A four-stage process—discover, define, develop, deliver—set clear roles for UX, product and engineering, with design critique and experience reviews as quality gates. Accessibility is part of every stage, not a final audit.
03
Measure what matters
At Philips, I ran more than 500 user tests, including FDA validation testing, and built an online testing site so feedback could scale through sales contracts.
I co-wrote a Technical Information Report with the FDA and AED industry leaders on how to validate AED usability.
At Microsoft, I introduced the System Usability Scale, ran it monthly, and built it into annual planning, so feature decisions were argued with data.
04
Build shared literacy
I launched a product education series for product, engineering and project teams to align vocabulary and speed up delivery; it scored 87% satisfaction across the series. At Philips, I partnered with the University of Washington’s Bioengineering school to bring design thinking into the engineering pipeline. Teaching at UW is part of the same instinct.
05
Work in the open, with users and partners
The best answers come from the people who live with the problem. I run co-creation workshops and design sprints with customers, responders and partners, and I bring AI into how my teams explore ideas.
Philips · 2020–22
Co-creating with the responder community
The business faced a big question: should we make a major investment in a cheaper AED? I designed and facilitated a series of co-creation workshops to find out, many of them virtual during COVID. They included a Future AED hackathon with UW, King County EMS and the Resuscitation Academy, and a 20-plus-person session with trained and untrained responders.
The answer surprised everyone, me included. People don’t want to buy an AED; they see it as expensive and for other people. Price wasn’t the barrier. Reach was. Instead of a cheaper device, we created a pilot that puts AEDs in the hands of verified, trained responders, working with King County, Rogers County EMS and PulsePoint.
Microsoft
An AI-first discovery loop
I changed how my team discovered and tested ideas. We used generative AI to build high-fidelity prototypes early and put them in front of people fast. Weak ideas failed in days rather than after engineering had started, which cut validation time and downstream engineering churn.