SafetyCulture - Head of Product Design

SafetyCulture is a $3bn Australian SaaS scale-up.

I lead the Product Design org, 22 designers and leads and report directly to the CEO/Founder.

My remit spans design vision and strategy, the operating model for how design ships, and the craft bar for an AI-first workplace operations platform serving 85,000+ businesses globally.

In late 2025 I was asked to step into the Head of Product Design role on an interim basis while SafetyCulture ran a global search for a permanent hire. Three months later, the CEO offered me the role permanently.

Here’s what I’ve been focussing on recently:

Rebuilding design for an AI-native workflow:

I incepted and led Ship Happens, a program that took the entire design org through a 30-day sprint to work prototype-first rather than spec-first using Claude, Figma, and GitHub as a single working loop instead of separate handoff stages.

  • 40 PRs shipped directly by designers

  • 18 working agents built and deployed by the design team

  • Rebuilt our design system on shadcn, replacing a legacy component library that was slowing every team down

The rebuilt design system has now been developed into a prototyping kit the entire business uses for “first draft” ideas. We start in code now.

Gearing up for what's next

Ship Happens was the start of a bigger shift, not the end point. As a next step, I challenged our senior designers to test how far we could push a fully code-native workflow: could a production change ship without opening Figma at all?

Using our new design system's pre-built, machine-readable components, the designer built the interface directly as a working prototype, then used Claude to draft the pull request. Last week, that shipped to production. A real experience, touching Front and Back End, live for users, where the only design deliverable was a draft PR.

  • Total cost: ~$45.74 in AI tokens

  • Estimated time saved: roughly one working day of front-end engineering time

Scaling the org without losing quality:

  • Grew Product Design from 9 to 22 designers in 6 months.

  • Flattened the org managerial hierarchy. Replacing Design Managers with squad/lead format to make us more nimble.

  • Designed and rolled out a performance framework built on job outcomes, personal growth, and values - replacing an ambiguous "impact rating" system designers didn't trust.

  • Rebuilt how the team gives and receives critique, embedding shared accountability for quality and consistency.

Culture-first improvements:

  • Introduced dedicated career conversations.

  • Transparently review anonymously submitted design org feedback with the whole team.

  • Arranged Skip-level meetings for all designers. Seniors now meeting with CPO.

  • I organise fortnightly learning sessions with internal and external expert speakers on design and tech.

  • Started systematically monitoring design velocity.

  • Started nominating a monthly “Vibe-Master” to keep team morale high. Sip & Paint was a winner 😁

Other leadership work at a glance…

Defining team values

Defining team values

Defining team values

Defining team values

Embedding design principals

Embedding design principals

Embedding design principals

Embedding design principals

Embedding ways of working

Embedding ways of working

Embedding ways of working

Embedding ways of working

Agreeing roles and responsibilities with prod and eng

Agreeing roles and responsibilities with prod and eng

Agreeing roles and responsibilities with prod and eng

Agreeing roles and responsibilities with prod and eng

Establishing daily and weekly structure for design org

Establishing daily and weekly structure for design org

Establishing daily and weekly structure for design org

Establishing daily and weekly structure for design org

More work