Octopus Investments
Head of UX and Design · July 2019 to November 2020
Building Octopus's first design system, then leading the team through a pandemic.
Octopus Investments is a UK-based asset manager and B Corporation managing over £14 billion for retail and institutional investors, with a focus on renewable energy, healthcare, and pioneering technology. The firm operated across multiple business lines and brands with fragmented design and no shared system. Delivery was slow, inconsistent, and hard to govern across marketing, content, design, and engineering. The investment side of the business ran Octopus Online, a digital platform for financial advisors to manage their clients' investments, alongside 8 public-facing websites for different business lines. None of them shared a visual language.
I was hired in July 2019 as Lead Designer to build DeepSea, Octopus's first cross-platform design system. Shortly after I arrived, the acting Head of Design left the business. I was promoted to Head of Design and took leadership of the full team: 8 designers, 2 researchers, and 1 content writer. The role became two things at once, delivering DeepSea across 9 products while establishing myself as a credible leader for a team I'd only just joined.
DeepSea started with an audit of every existing website to define which patterns were actually needed. That audit gave us the scope: what to build, what to consolidate, what to retire. From there, myself and two other designers built the system from foundations up, atoms to organisms, with short critique and feedback loops across design, product, and marketing before handoff to the third-party development agency. I brought the content team in early to protect SEO rankings during the replatform. DeepSea was designed and built within a few months of my arrival.
The hardest part wasn't the system itself. It was the team dynamics. One of the designers had been leading the project before I arrived and, understandably, felt let down when I took the lead. I handled it through direct conversations, collaborative working, and creating a clear plan forward that included his contribution. When I presented that plan to senior stakeholders and got buy-in, the project gained momentum. He came around, and that collaborative approach helped me earn trust with the wider team. I believe it also helped senior leadership see that I could take on the Head of Design role when it opened up.
DeepSea was deployed across 9 products: octopusgroup.com, octopusinvestments.com, octopusventures.com, octopusrenewables.com, octopus-realestate.com, and several others that have since been consolidated, as well as Octopus Online, the adviser-facing investment platform. The system unified the front-end experience, simplified governance, and gave every business line a shared visual language for the first time.
When Covid hit
The second half of the role was defined by the pandemic. Financial advisors using our platform were swamped by client nervousness as markets crashed. Tens of millions of pounds in high-wealth client portfolios were in play, and advisors needed real-time information from Octopus to manage their conversations.
Using a lean UX approach, I designed a product updates feature in less than half a day: FAQs, a contact form to reduce the volume of calls advisors were receiving, and a live feed of product-by-product updates filterable by product type. We deployed it using DeepSea within days. That speed was a direct result of having the design system in place. It was also a huge win for the visibility of the design and research team during a critically important moment for the business. Rather than furloughing the team during the pandemic, we demonstrated that design could respond to a crisis with the same urgency as engineering or operations.
< 1 day
Feature designed and deployed in days
During a market crash, using DeepSea
What I learned
A design system is only as good as the adoption model behind it. The technical quality matters, but so does the relationship between the system team and the product teams consuming it. At Octopus I learned that navigating those relationships, especially when you're new and taking the lead on something someone else started, is as much a leadership skill as any strategic framework. The trust you build with individuals determines whether the system gets adopted or worked around. DeepSea is still in use across Octopus's websites today, which I take as evidence that the relationships held.
