Mindful product designer helping people touch grass

I've been guiding people into deeper connection with nature for years — leading awe walks, facilitating meditations outdoors, helping people slow down enough to notice what's alive around them.

In 2025, I completed a vision quest. Four days on the land, alone, paying close attention to the natural world. It clarified something I'd been circling for a long time: the work I want to do should serve the relationship between people and the living world.

I don't think you can design good nature tech without understanding what connection to nature actually feels like. That experience shapes how I approach product decisions — what to measure, what to surface to a user, and what to leave alone.

In 2014, I left a permanent job and started travelling slowly. Trekking in Nepal. Meditation retreats in the hills of Thailand. Surfing in Morocco. Four years living in Barcelona. I wasn't on holiday — I was learning how to see differently. Different cultures, different systems, different ways of solving problems.

That curiosity carried into everything I built. I co-founded several businesses, including Nickelled, a B2B SaaS product I designed and helped grow over four years until it was acquired in 2022. I was the first designer at Shutl, the UK's #1 Startup of the Year, where I designed real-time logistics tools that enabled 15-minute retail deliveries — and stayed through the acquisition by eBay. At Wholesome, my own studio, I designed and developed Thyself, an AI mental health coach that reached 70,000 users, and built Awe, an app connecting city dwellers with nature.

I also built Humane Tech London, a community bringing together the tech for good crowd — 6 events, 18 expert speakers, and 600 attendees exploring how technology can serve people and planet rather than extract from them. It taught me that the best way to shift an industry is to gather the right people in a room.

I've worked at scale and from scratch. B2B and B2C. Big tech and bootstrapped. The common thread is complex problems, real users, and shipping things that work.

I'm a long-term meditator. I've sat multiple silent retreats and spent a month in a zen monastery in 2024, living the monastic schedule to understand what sustained attention really looks like.

That sounds unrelated to product design. It isn't.

The best design work I've done has come from listening properly — to users in research sessions, to stakeholders with competing priorities, to data that's saying something uncomfortable. Meditation is training in exactly that: paying attention without rushing to a conclusion.

In practice, I run JTBD research and customer interviews. I facilitate design sprints and workshops. I design in Figma and build in React. More recently, Claude Code and Cursor have become my go-to tools for rapid prototyping and exploration — AI has fundamentally changed how fast I can move from idea to working product.

I also studied at the London Interdisciplinary School, where the focus is on tackling complex, wicked problems that don't sit neatly within a single discipline. Green energy and nature tech are full of exactly these problems — systems that span policy, behaviour, ecology, and technology all at once. That training gave me a framework for holding complexity rather than simplifying it away too early.

I'm comfortable working across the full stack of product development, from discovery through to shipping code. The contemplative stuff just means I'm less likely to skip the hard, ambiguous early stages where the real insights live.