Leadership

UX Director

When our previous UX Manager left Ocado Group (2018), I applied for the position and got the job. This was the beginning of my Leadership journey. Today UX Director, I now manage all the UX teams across the Ecommerce department.

Building trust isn’t always easy; it takes time and dedication. Creating a psychologically-safe workplace is even harder. And getting your team aligned, focused and working as one is a never-ending task…

But it’s my job, and I love it.

Leadership Apprenticeship

In 2025, I took a 14-month-long Leadership Apprenticeship delivered by Imperial College and Cordnel (funded by Ocado). This comprehensive course, tailored for Senior Leaders, gave me a deeper and more holistic understanding of my leadership practice.

Across 46 modules divided into 6 units, it helped me connect different aspects and theories of leadership styles, strategy, change and risk management as well as how to create a high-performing team rooted in trust, psychological safety, a growth mindset and DEI.

We also covered other key topics such as brand and personal reputation, how to shape customer demand, the importance of good governance, and how storytelling is vital in stakeholder management.

Leading with Design Principles

With so many designers working on the same ecommerce solution, having some guiding principles proved to be useful to create alignment and feedback on designs objectively. A lot of companies out there have design principles and so we decided not to re-invent the wheel, but take inspiration from them and make them work with our unique online grocery context. We ended up with 3 principles: Usability, Quality & Joy.

We’re still learning how to best use them in our day-to-day design practice, but they’ve helped us anchor our feedback in design reviews.

Leading with a vision: Ecom 2030

Leading without a vision is a recipe for disaster. With so many different crafts, talents and opinions working on the same product, it became apparent that we needed a shared vision, something to get us all aligned behind. So working with the entire UX team, as well as contributors from various crafts (engineering, product, data, tech comms, sales…) we set out to create our experience vision: a snippet of how we'd like users to experience our product in the near future. Set in 2030, this experience vision is based on a comprehensive research study and follows users across our 3 main geographies: Europe, North America and Asia.

2023 Themes

To come up with this vision, we first collected a vast amount of data from many different sources: user research insights, competitor benchmarking, technology trends, business goals… and organised all of these into themes. We then weaved a story around these themes, to help bring them to life and make the whole narrative user centric.

These themes are now used in various workshops to guide product outcomes and overall domain strategy. Everything Ecom 2030 is accessible to the entire organisation on an internal website built to store all materials, ready for others to use as needed.