Design leadership to reduce product mistakes, accelerate delivery, and align teams at scale.
Crater Plato works with teams whose products have outgrown their foundations.
I help reduce avoidable mistakes, speed up delivery, and bring product, design, and engineering into tighter alignment — so growth happens in the right areas, without creating chaos elsewhere.
Hands-on. Senior. Ruthless about clarity.
Based in Sheffield. Working with teams across the UK and internationally.
When I’m usually brought in
You don’t need design evangelism.
You need things to work properly again.
Common signs:
Teams are shipping, but creating rework and UX debt
Growth experiments move fast and fragment the product
Design systems exist, but slow delivery instead of helping
Product, design, and engineering aren’t misaligned — just not aligned enough
Decisions feel heavier than they should at your stage
The product works, but no longer makes sense as a whole
This is where senior design judgment creates leverage.
What I actually do
I focus on removing friction, not polishing symptoms.
That typically means:
Reducing avoidable design and product mistakes
Creating systems that eliminate decision fatigue
Aligning teams around shared patterns, constraints, and language
Supporting growth without degrading trust or coherence
The result is a calmer product organisation that can move faster with fewer surprises.
The work is clean, typographically strong, and visually coherent — because clarity depends on it — but function always leads.
How the work happens
Diagnose
Identify where friction, rework, and risk are really coming from across product, UX, and delivery.
Systemise
Establish foundations that support speed: patterns, tokens, principles, and constraints teams can rely on.
Ship
Translate direction into execution-ready work engineers can build without second-guessing.
Enable
Leave teams aligned, confident, and able to move without dependency.
Proof
Creative Fabrica — Design leadership across a 30M-user marketplace
Two-year embedded role working across marketplace UX, growth initiatives, and design systems — helping Creative Fabrica scale experimentation while reducing UX debt, decision friction, and systemic risk.
The focus wasn’t surface polish.
It was fewer mistakes, faster delivery, and systems that could absorb growth without entropy.
Engagement
Crater Plato works with teams who want senior design leadership without agency overhead or long onboarding cycles.
Typical engagements include:
Product and UX audits at scale
Design system foundations or resets
Growth-focused UX work
Fractional or embedded design leadership
Short discovery. Clear scope. High-impact work.
If your product is growing and the complexity is starting to show, this is the moment where design can either slow you down — or create leverage.