Scott Stephens
Design Operations Lead in London
About
I’m a Design Operations Lead currently working at Kin + Carta Europe based in London. I have over 10 years experience as a product designer working in the tech industry across multiple different areas and platforms, with my passion designing native applications.
More recently I've moved into a managerial/operational role focusing on supporting design teams and improving how they work. I enjoy creating a collaborative and engaging environment enabling designers to produce their best work.
Side Projects
A curated collection of podcasts dedicated to all things DesignOps
Speaking
Ask any DesignOps practitioner to name their “go-to” tool and you’re likely to hear them wax poetically of their love for spreadsheets. We get it – the spreadsheet is a reliable workhorse with a number of tricks up its sleeve. But, it’s not the only game in town. In fact, if you haven’t ventured outside of Excel lately, you may be surprised to learn that there are a number of nifty new tools in town, and we’ve got the perfect opportunity for you to get a taste of what they can do.
In this month’s DesignOps Community Call, we’ll hear from DesignOps Community Curator Farid Sabitov and Design Operations Lead for Kin + Carta Europe, Scott Stephens as they dive into two tools that have been gaining popularity among DesignOps pros, Coda and Notion.
Features
I recently spoke to Andrea Lim (Content Marketing at Notion) to explain how we leverage Notion to run our Design Practice at Kin + Carta.
Work Experience
Leading Design Operations for the Design Practice at Kin + Carta Europe, our team is made up of 80+ designers with a range of specialisms including Product Design, Experience Design & Research. I focus on amplifying the impact our team has with our clients and the people we're designing products for. I enable our designers through scalable processes, tooling and project set up to help them produce their best work.
I'm also a key advocate for design across the business working with stakeholders across Sales, Operations, Delivery and Technology to better sell design as one of our key offerings to our clients.
I'm Currently building our DesignOps team and service offering to empower our clients and design teams to increase the impact they have in their organisations and industries.
As part of the Design Systems team at Tesco I partner with the Design Lead to support and enable a team of Product Designers to deliver and maintain the Tesco Design System in Figma that empowers 70+ designers across the organisation to deliver scalable design solutions for multiple Tesco digital products.
This role is via an engagement between Kin + Carta & Tesco.
I managed the day to day operations of our team of 17 Product and Experience designers. I make sure each of our designers have the tools required to enable them to focus solely on their design work. I drive forward best practices on tooling, project setup, recruitment, onboarding and internal processes for other areas of the business using tools such as Notion and Miro.
I also line manage 3 of our designers and have recently supported 2 of them to promotions to senior.
As a Senior Product Designer at The App Business I got to lead the design direction on multiple products across native and web platforms for brands such as B&Q, Kingfisher (see above), Visa, Racing Post and First Bus.
As part of the design leadership team I improved internal processes, contributed to pitches and recruited new designers to the team. I worked alongside Sales and Delivery stakeholders to insure successful resourcing of designers for new projects.
My focus was to visualise and deliver pixel perfect designs for mobile apps across iOS and Android for some of our clients biggest products including Ford's Go Drive app, Tesco's Groceries app and First Group's travel planner app.
I also supported and mentored younger members of the team to improve their design process, focusing on visual design in Sketch and prototyping with Marvel.
I worked alongside designers and developers in cross functional product teams to deliver design solutions for clients such as The Times, Go-Ahead (see first image) and News UK (Sun Goals app, see second image)
I joined The App Business as their first design intern and 5th member of the design team. Over 6 months I shadowed and supported the design team on various projects including discovery work for Headspace & production work for Talk Talk.