i won a competition and never left

i didn’t plan to stay.

i entered Univative in my final year of uni — a design competition, real briefs from real companies, proper stakes. ClickView was one of them. i worked on their brief, presented it, and won. they offered me a job. i said yes.

that was nearly ten years ago.

i get asked about it sometimes. usually the question is framed like staying is the surprising part — like the interesting version of the story would’ve been leaving. but i think that gets it backwards. staying somewhere long enough to actually understand it, to go from the person asking questions to the person who already knows the answer and the three things that came before it — that’s not the safe choice. that’s its own kind of risk.

when i started it was just me. one designer, one product, a small team figuring it out. now there are eight of us. i went from doing the work to leading the people who do the work, which sounds like a natural progression but is actually a completely different job that nobody warns you about.

at 24 i became a manager. i had no idea what i was doing. i knew what good design looked like. i had no idea how to help someone else find their way to it without just doing it myself. that gap — between knowing the craft and knowing how to grow other people in it — took years to close. i’m still closing it.

what staying gave me: depth. i know this product, this industry, these people. i’ve seen decisions made and then reversed. i’ve watched a team go from three people to thirty-five. i’ve had the same conversation about the same problem with four different stakeholders over five years and watched the org slowly come around to something we said early. that only happens if you’re still there.

what staying costs: sometimes you have to actively resist the gravity of how things have always been done. the longer you’re somewhere the more you accumulate — processes, opinions, unspoken assumptions about what’s possible. the risk isn’t stagnation exactly. it’s calcification. knowing too much can make you stop asking why.

i try to stay curious about the place i know best. it’s harder than it sounds.

if you’re navigating a decision that’s been circling for too long — team direction, a strategic call, something with too many inputs and no clear owner — i offer structured research synthesis to turn the noise into a clear recommendation. $300.