Twenty-five years in rooms where the product had to be right.

The AI assistant for the commodities industry, with verification and compliance built in. The assistant: ask it about any of 43 commodities (metals, energy, agriculture, shipping) and the law and research behind them, in English, Chinese and Arabic. The verification side: KYB on companies, KYC on people, sanctions and PEP screening, biometric liveness, and a trust graph of connections and messaging among verified members only. The compliance layer: published non-binding intent, a five-step consignment flow from identity to closure, and document versioning with struck-through removals and preserved history, so the record cannot be rewritten afterwards. The problem it exists to solve: a chain of custody that could be edited after the fact without anyone knowing. I designed and built the platform end to end, with agents doing most of the building; live since July 2026.

Crypto product work with a Ukrainian engineering team. Our main product was a smart-contract risk scanner that sandboxed new token and project releases across chains and ran time and transactions against them to detect rug pulls before investors were hurt. I did trading, branding and the public face. The war took the team.

I opened a UX internship when one engineer's partner asked to learn. Sixteen signed up, fourteen turned up, three months of real projects (including designing WeUX's own brand and site through my branding workshops), then a second cohort. I took nothing; contract revenue went to the people doing the work. Graduates are now working internationally.

From an Airbnb in Thailand, I designed the product for a Helium network deployment: $1.5m sold in the first two weeks.

Five weeks. I interviewed the CEO and every manager and sub-manager in the organisation, then designed the 10x strategy and four years of transition states to reach it.

The bank had six years of failed attempts at end-to-end digital onboarding before the call came. Conception to public launch in nine months (9 December 2021): Europe's first fully digital onboarding for accounts, cards, loans and mortgages, built with the Bank of Spain in the room. I managed eight designers and researchers, built the design system, and ended up running the UX team. Earlier work for the bank included the feature that splits card purchases over €100 into monthly instalments. I ran the programme, for a year, from a 45-foot sailing boat in Greece.

Brought in to rescue the National Geographic learning platform. I built a new design system, shipped the key projects and handed over. 2020 SIIA CODiE Award.

I led the team and designed the complete design system for web and desktop analytics applications. We finished early.

Product redesign; user adoption and retention up by more than 400%.

I designed and built a B2C retail mobile application from the ground up.

Product management and UX architecture for high-growth startups and some of the world's largest SaaS and enterprise companies, across fintech, marketplaces, logistics and education. Alongside: I was among the first to teach Lean UX in Europe (from 2016), consulted on business-model design for founders, designed ten MVPs free for Barcelona startups, advised at Barcelona incubators and hackathons, and ran a product-design and product-management school from coworking spaces until lockdown closed it. When nobody was paying: four years of forex and trading algorithms, Ethereum mining, and beer, wine and tea review apps built as experiments. During lockdown I sold hundreds of abstract paintings worldwide as Barklem Art.

Hired as a technical designer for a music recommendation product, then handed the finance idea nobody knew how to build. With one backend engineer I conceived it in days, prototyped it in a day or two, took it to a working demo, then scaled it across 150–200 engineers and designers in Norway, Spain and the United States. I was promoted to Creative Director of the company within four weeks. BBVA invested €28m and became the first Spanish bank with real PFM inside online banking. Strands Finance went on to Barclays, ING, BMO, Deutsche Bank, PNB and Banco Sabadell; MoneyStrands, the consumer version, passed 100,000 users and won a 2010 Webby. Finovate awards 2010, 2011 and 2012. I left after five years with the roadmap years deep in my designs; the product today is what I drew then.

I arrived with no job. I worked out how hiring actually happened by asking people inside companies, found the publication they used, read every issue and went to its office in person. Two years building web products for founders, front end and back end, with a mentor who is thanked in the book.

Five-person experiential agency. I designed and ran the go-to-market for Vodafone's UK 3G launch (commercial launch 10 November 2004): staff training, a nationwide event programme, a demonstration tunnel at football grounds, shopping malls and London landmarks, the demonstration itself designed across sight, sound, smell and engagement. UK launches for Sony, O2, Audi, Wolf Blass and Pret A Manger, and the Totally London book distribution for the Mayor of London: a team of 120 across twelve cities. I left the UK after two near-fatal cycling accidents in London.

I moved Social Services from paper to a computerised case-management system: research interviews with the people doing the work, system design, delivery. User research before the job had a name in that world.

Platinum support for mission- and life-critical systems (health, military, finance, broadcast) with a 45-minute restore SLA, contracts worth more than the servers, and parts moved by motorcycle and helicopter. Year one in the UK; year two leading the European English-language team, one of twelve across EMEA. I took every training course Sun ran (Java, Solaris and system administration, network management, hardware installation and diagnostics) and passed them all. This is where I learned analytical troubleshooting under a clock. I left when the work ended.

I walked in offering six months unpaid to get experience; the director walked me round the building describing his problems and paid work started that afternoon. I built the IT infrastructure from scratch. At six months I interviewed my own replacement, as agreed, and left for Sun.

Programming from age nine. Carpentry apprentice at 16–18 building homes and furniture, until two employers went bust. Then I taught myself computer and network engineering from books, printing out facts until the walls of my room were covered in A4 paper, and passed every professional exam I sat, paid for by driving vans, mixing cement, making furniture, bar and restaurant work, and PCs I built and sold. I turned down the course's guaranteed placements, posted my CV to hundreds of companies, and chose Sun over Capgemini.