Building the design practice behind Australia’s company director education
I joined as a founding product designer and stayed 2.5+ years. I didn’t just ship features. I built the digital product practice AICD now runs on.
The Australian Institute of Company Directors educates 50,000+ current, aspiring, and retired directors on corporate governance. I joined as one of its founding product designers and stayed 2.5+ years.
In that time I established the digital product practice the org now runs on: the process, the design system, the research function, and the HCD capability, alongside shipping the member-facing feature work itself.
Goal: modernise member-facing product at pace, and build the practice that lets the org keep doing it without me in the room.
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Period
- 2022–2025
- Stack
- FigmaDesign SystemsUser ResearchService DesignHCDAnalytics
The starting state
Why join a corporate education company? It’s niche territory for a product designer. But AICD had two things that mattered: low product maturity, and real backing from business leaders. That combination is rare. It meant I wasn’t optimising someone else’s practice, I was building and owning one from scratch.
Where it started: When I joined there was no design system, no shared process, no research function, and little awareness of HCD. Every screen was a one-off and every product decision got re-litigated from zero. Fine for an org that ships occasionally. Useless for one trying to modernise member-facing product at pace.
Feature delivery
The work that moved the numbers. Two flows, researched both ways, then rebuilt.
Member dashboard redesign
(member dashboard)
The problem: Members couldn’t navigate their own dashboard. Core flows were buried, and the friction surfaced as complaints and abandoned journeys.
I ran the research both ways before touching a screen. Qualitatively: user research on the screens themselves, card sorting to rebuild the information architecture, and a read of customer complaint cases. Quantitatively: analytics to frame the key jobs-to-be-done flows and pinpoint where users hit contention. Working from those insights, I reworked the navigation structure and introduced Card CTAs routing members straight to the jobs they came to do.
Before / after — navigation restructure and Card CTAs
The redesign drove engagement uplifts across every core flow, and an 85% reduction in complaints:
User engagement uplifts
Purchase flow optimisation
(purchase flow)
The problem: AICD ran a single purchase flow for every product. One path covering everything meant bloated data capture and more steps than any one purchase needed.
Research surfaced the reframe: members approach buying with one of two mindsets, transactional or membership. So I split the single flow in two and optimised each independently, balancing the business’s data-capture needs against what each type of buyer actually wanted to do.
“I want the purchase flow to be as seamless as buying from Amazon.”
8-page purchase, cut to 3
I hit it by cutting an 8-page purchase down to 3, reducing screens and interactions by 45%, which lifted processed revenue on a multi-million-dollar journey and cut drop-off.
Building the practice
The repeated cost of one-off screens was speed and consistency. Nothing was reusable, so every project started from zero. I remediated the legacy design files and built AICD’s first design system, then established the operating rhythm around it: design reviews, a community of practice, and defined ways of working between product designers and the wider org.
The system only mattered if the org could use it, and design didn’t exist outside the design team. So as AICD’s HCD ambassador I ran internal workshops and published learning articles, upskilling 70+ colleagues. The shift was the point: HCD moved from something the design team did to the org into how the org framed product decisions itself.
Decision — Incremental system, not a big-bang release
- Chose
- I built the design system incrementally: foundations and the most common components first, then components created or updated ad-hoc as each feature area and platform demanded them.
- Rejected
- The comprehensive upfront build: months of system work before any of it shipped value.
- Why
- The incremental approach protected sprint delivery speed while still compounding the benefits of a system, instead of stalling the roadmap for a release nobody had asked for yet.
Research & service design
AICD had never run primary member research. I established the function: 60+ member interviews, surveys, and workshops, turning raw voice-of-customer into direction the delivery squad could act on rather than opinion that sat in a deck.
That same service-design lens scaled up to the board. AICD had a CRM transformation in flight, a multi-million-dollar investment the board was uneasy about on two fronts: the spend itself, and the productivity drain of the rollout. I was tasked with unpacking the real impact and communicating it back. I ran organisation-wide service blueprinting across the business and customer-service functions, and built an end-to-end blueprint as the centrepiece, mapping the uplift the transformation would deliver for both customers and staff. I presented it directly to the Board and the CEO.
Decision — A service blueprint, not a business case
- Chose
- I communicated the transformation’s value as an end-to-end service blueprint, showing the board where the investment actually landed across the customer and staff journey.
- Rejected
- The conventional numbers-led readout, which would have answered “what does it cost” but not “what does it change.”
- Why
- The board didn’t need another financial model. The blueprint reframed an anxious cost conversation into a clear picture of impact.
What I established
A design system that outlived me
AICD’s first design system is still the foundation member-facing product is built on. The operating rhythm around it, the design reviews and community of practice, is how the team works rather than something I introduced and took with me.
HCD as an org capability, not a design-team service
HCD is now how the org frames product decisions, not a discipline 70+ colleagues sat through once. It moved from something the design team did to the org into how the org thinks.
A research function and a voice of the customer
The research function I stood up gave AICD its first real voice of the customer (60+ interviews, surveys and workshops), and the service-design lens behind it reached all the way to the board.
Numbers that moved
A 162% engagement lift across core flows, complaints down 85%, an 8-page purchase cut to 3. The numbers are the easy part to point at. The practice is what stayed.
