About

What I do

I run a design function. That means the hiring, the standard everything is measured against, the review that holds it there, and the argument with whoever needs arguing with, rather than the file itself.

At Madison every creative deliverable is mine to approve. The role also came with Country Manager: the relationships with regional clients, the ones who prefer to work in English, and, since head office is elsewhere and I am the most senior person here, everything legal that lands in Malaysia.

The creed

Design is subtraction. The journeys I am proudest of are shorter than the ones I was handed. Taking a step out is harder than adding a screen, and it is the part that moves a number.

A preference is not a decision. A heat map, a session recording, a test with a number on the end of it. If the only argument for a screen is that somebody senior likes it, it is not finished.

The creed, continued

A system outlives the handover. Teams disperse and companies wind down. The system, the playbook and the standard are the parts of the work that keep paying after everybody has gone.

My output is other people’s work. I am measured on drawings I did not make. Hiring the team, setting the standard and reviewing against it is the job; the file belongs to whoever is closest to the problem.

Where I have led

Designers I have led have sat in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, China and the Philippines. Not all at once, and not all now. That is six countries across five roles, which is a different claim from a team of six countries today.

The current unit is nine designers across four countries. One of the juniors I hired reached mid-level inside the year.

Bank Danamon

The responsive web application for one of Indonesia’s largest banks. I led its front-end UI. In its first year it reached more than eight million registered users.

OCBC Singapore

The investment module’s interface, for a Singapore bank whose digital investment offering was recognised in 2020. My work was the module; the award was theirs.

What it taught me

Holding both titles meant I could not hand a problem across a desk and call it finished. Whatever I drew, I would be the one making it work, so the drawing learned to respect the build and the build learned to keep the drawing’s intent.

That is where my habit of designing the handoff itself began: the join between two disciplines is a design problem like any other, and it fails in the same places. Banking at national scale taught me the rest. A small decision repeated across a bank’s whole customer base is not a small decision, and the discipline is in what you leave out of a screen rather than in what you add to it. I left with a respect for engineers that has shaped how I lead them since, and one habit above all: I ask for the constraint before I ask for the pixel.

Two tracks at once

The app had to keep earning while it was being rebuilt. So there were two pieces of work running against each other: new features shipping onto the thing that existed, and a scalable redesign being drawn underneath it against technical constraints nobody chose.

The playbook

The system and the playbook came out of that. Not as a document exercise, but as the only way two tracks could produce one product, and the way a handoff stopped being an argument.

What it taught me

Leading for the first time meant the work stopped being mine to finish. Before BINFINITE I could judge a day by what I had drawn; afterwards a good day was one where somebody else’s screen came back better than the brief, and I had to learn to be glad of that rather than tempted to redraw it.

The two tracks forced the lesson quickly. When new features and a redesign are moving at once, a lead who is buried in a file is a lead who is not looking at the join between them, and the join was where the product was actually being decided. So I moved to where the decisions were: the standard, the review, and the playbook that let two streams produce one product. I still miss the file some days, and I have never once regretted leaving it.

The first month

There was already a flow. I revamped the entire thing in my first month. Not because a new person should redraw everything, but because the heat maps and the usage data said where people were falling out and the answer was structural rather than cosmetic.

The purchase journey went from eight steps to three. In the first month after it shipped, click-through rose 62% and conversion 33%.

Building the function

Founding team means there is no function until you build one. I recruited the designers, set the standard, and put a unified design system under the work so that the second product did not have to re-argue the first one’s decisions.

How it ended

AQM wound down at the end of 2024. The investment ran out and the founding team was let go, all of it, including me.

What I was there for

A consultant is hired for a specific stuck thing. Mine was the foreign-currency exchange journey, the one where a customer buys physical cash, and the design systems that everything else in the estate was meant to be built from.

The estate

Maybank is not one product. Getting a direction agreed means getting it agreed across business units that each own a piece of the customer and answer to different people. Most of the work was there rather than on a canvas.

What it taught me

A consultant walks into a room where everybody already knows what the problem is and nobody agrees on it. As far as I could see, the journey was stuck less on any one screen than on the number of people who had a say in it, and my job was to give them one artefact they could all argue about instead of several they could each ignore.

Three months is not long enough to change how a bank works, and I did not try. It is long enough to get a direction agreed and drawn to the standard the estate expects, so that the teams who stayed had something to build against rather than something to debate. I also learnt what it is to have no reports and still be answerable for the result, which is closer to what a head of design does most days than most people think. Everything I do with stakeholders now started here.

Three titles in eleven months

I came in as UI/UX Lead in February 2025. Six months later the role became Design Unit Leader, and in January 2026 Head of UI/UX. The scope grew each time: from leading the work, to owning the unit, to owning the function.

The unit

Five designers were already here when I arrived. There are nine now, across Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Turkey. Four of them I hired, and one of those came in junior and reached mid-level inside the year.

Nine people in four countries and three time zones is not a bigger version of five in one office. It is a different job: the standard has to be written down, because it cannot be transmitted by sitting next to someone.

What the role actually covers

Every creative deliverable that leaves Madison is mine to approve. That is the design function, and it is the half of the job with a title that says design on it.

The other half is Country Manager. Head office is not here, and I am the most senior executive who is, so the relationships with regional clients, the clients who would rather work in English, and everything legal that arrives in Malaysia come to me.