UNLOCKING A £10M BUDGET THROUGH VISION SETTING
Head of Product Design · October 2022 — Present
A team that builds its own direction argues for its budget far more convincingly.
When I joined Student Beans in October 2022, the Product Design team had never set its own direction. Values had been handed down rather than built with the team, and the result was a group with strong technical ability but little collective ownership over where the function was heading or why.
I brought the team together to build a mission and vision from scratch, rather than inherit one, working through what we actually wanted to be known for and what would need to be true for that to happen. That process gave us something concrete to point to when we set our first annual objectives, and it gave the team a reason to believe in them beyond being told to.
The following January, Design and Research led the company strategy for the first time in Pion's history, working from a human-centred view of where the business needed to go rather than responding to a brief handed down from elsewhere. That work led directly to a £10 million budget allocation for retention, and an early lift in onboarding conversion of 94% once the resulting changes went live.
The lesson I took from it is one I've carried into every leadership role since: a team that has built its own direction argues for its budget far more convincingly than one that's simply been given a brief to deliver against.