During my years at Refined, I hired, coached and developed talent to raise the overall design maturity. Beyond team leadership, I facilitated cross-functional workshops and optimized product development processes.

I developed a Product Discovery playbook that enabled not just designers but entire cross-functional teams to surface user insights and make grounded product decisions. The goal wasn’t to impose a rigid methodology, but to offer a lightweight, modular toolkit that teams could use on their own terms. It created a shared way of working that reduced dependency on the design department, while raising the overall quality of discovery work, effectively democratizing research and making teams more self-sufficient.

I also facilitated design sprints to build alignment and momentum around pivotal product improvements, including a major refresh of the site builder experience. These sprints became a structured way to cut through ambiguity, bring stakeholders into the problem space, and rapidly test assumptions before committing effort. The work helped teams converge on clear direction while still preserving the exploratory spirit needed to rethink a complex, widely-used product area.

Daniel brings this sort of holistic expertise, with a focus on design, to any and all projects that he's involved in. I've experienced him to be an exceptionally kind, empathetic, and open individual - all qualities that I value highly in and out of the workplace.

- Raj Sehmi, Customer Success Lead at Refined

This work refined (pun intended) my understanding of how organisations may adopt new practices: the most effective tools are those that expand capability without increasing process weight. I also saw how shared discovery habits can shift team culture-making insights more accessible, decisions more transparent and more fluid across roles.