Case study: Zoopla Leadership & Management

Overview

I recruited over 25 diverse designers across various disciplines and co-designed the design function alongside senior leadership, forming cross-functional teams, including a dedicated design system team.

I developed a career framework and unique career canvas to help designers set and achieve meaningful goals, while also refining team ceremonies to build a collaborative culture.

I actively coached and supported my team through significant change with a strong focus on mental health. I aligned stakeholders through storytelling, and used my commercial acumen and growth mindset as a force for good.

Company: Zoopla

Role: Head of Consumer Product Design

Year: 2019 - 2024

people management alignment change management career coaching

Problem to solve

The challenge: Scale and mature a 25+ team of Product, Content and Visual Designers, across all seniority levels.

Outcome

Today Zoopla has a strong skills diverse team with a happy mature design culture.

It wasn't all plain sailing. There were redundancies, mergers with other functions not to mention a pandemic to navigate.

The Highlights

Recruited over 25 talented designers across Product, Content, and Visual Design, from Principal to entry-level roles, with a strong emphasis on diversity and inclusion.
Co-designed the design function in collaboration with the VP of Product Experience and the CPO, building cross-functional teams, including a dedicated design system team.
Developed a career framework to compete with top tech companies and created a unique career canvas to help designers set and achieve meaningful objectives.
Established and refined team ceremonies through several iterations to foster a collaborative culture.
Actively coached, nurtured, and developed my team, driven by my passion for mental health and supporting my people.
Focused on aligning stakeholders and using storytelling to ensure everyone worked cohesively towards common goals.
Used my data-driven, growth mindset as a force for good, helping designers understand commercials.
Got hands-on when the business faced setbacks and redundancies, reviving my design skills to create new experiences, including launching a new revenue stream with the subscription service—see the Zoopla Plus case study.

A few visuals

My day-to-day as a leader at Zoopla

Designing the design org

I translated business needs into strategy and ultimately into structuring the design team which included:

Attracting and hiring skills diverse talent
Setting realistic goals that aligned to the business as well as personal goals for individual career development.
Creating Research, Product Design and Content Design functions.
Helping exec and senior leaders understand the need for certain skillsets and getting buy-in to grow the team. Especially during challenging financial times.
Led team alignment sessions such as design crit and design offsites. Worked with the Design senior leadership and VP to ensure cross collaboration with Product and Engineering.

Design team management

Alongside the other Head of Product Design and the VP I:

Coached, nurtured and career progressed over 25 Researchers, Product Designers, Content Designers and Writers with 121’s, career coaching and caring deeply about the wellbeing of my people.
Created a career framework to rival the top tech firms.
Cultivated a really welcoming, friendly design team with no ego’s and a high performing, learning environment. Including “learn from me days” where the team buddied up for th day to learn from each other. Ran many design sprints and fun days successfully remote, hybrid and in-person.
Most importantly I created an open door where the team felt they could talk to me about anything and I will listen!

Strategy

Ran a diagnostic of the consumer part of the business making recommendations for improvements in short and long term strategy.
Ran workshops for Exec leadership to unlock new revenue pools.
Created a vision for the My Home product and Zoopla Plus. Including all the background research, experimentation and design see the Zoopla Plus Case Study

Commericals

Learnt business and commercial acumen and got to grips with EBITDA and balance sheets. I feel this is very important for a leader to understand the bottom line so they can translate this to the team in a way that resonates with them.
Growth driven - Much of my work at Zoopla was in growth teams. Powering commercial goals with design thinking and rapid discovery to delivery.