Global Design Director @ Fierce™, Fearless™

I’m an Industrial Designer turned UX Designer, turned Service Designer, turned (accidental) leader. 

Since moving into the digital space over a decade ago, I’ve seen the same patterns repeat: 
Design teams are being asked to deliver more impact and faster; but often without the levers to make it happen. 

Now as Managing Director at Fearless, I work with senior Design and business leaders to help navigate some of these challenges and embed Design as a genuine strategic capability. 

We help organisations: 

- Embed Service Design and DesignOps as a strategic capability
- Build and scale in-house design teams that deliver measurable business impact
- Design operating models that connect design, delivery and strategy
- Prove the value of Design through operational outcomes (as well as beautiful outputs!)

Our agency + talent services model blends the depth of a large consultancy with the agility of a boutique partner. 

We act as an extension of our clients’ teams - helping them move fast, think big and of course deliver meaningful change. 

If you’re navigating cost-cutting, change fatigue or the constant push to “do more with less,” you’re not alone. 

There are always smarter, lower-risk ways to build momentum (and Design can be the lever that gets you there). 

I’m always happy to share what’s working or swap notes with other leaders facing similar challenges; feel free to reach out.

—— 

Proud to lead a team that truly lives its name: authentically Fearless 😎

Laura Baker

‼️ Available Service Designers ... a fun role for you ‼️

Contract details:
-  6 month contract
-  Senior / lead level
-  Start ASAP
-  Day rate: ~£550
-  Mostly remote but may require a few days in a London office (UK only)
-  Must have insurance / complex financial / consumer duty experience

Work details:
-  Complete outstanding Phase 1 customer journey maps across the client’s products and build on these in Phase 2 to create more detailed, actionable artefacts
-  Embed FCA Consumer Duty requirements and address the needs of vulnerable customers, while supporting cross-functional collaboration to inform solution development and continuous improvement


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Thank you as always LinkedIn :)

I lead design teams. I love making designers lives better by helping them with their career growth.

Dan Winer

Whatever you call yourself
UX, UI/UX, product designer.

UI is part of the product.
The product is part of the experience.
And the business is the context for all of it.

This year, aim to go beyond delivering prototypes.

That means: 
• Use visuals to bring clarity to ambiguous problems
• Consider how decisions scale across the product
• Understand what customers are trying to achieve
• Explain how your work changes their behaviour
• Connect behaviour change to business goals
• Communicate intended outcomes, not just solutions
• Take ownership of what ships, not just design files
• Track flows, drop-offs, and time-to-value
• Shape the problem, not just the interface

This is the shift from executing design work to building influence, shaping the problem, and owning outcomes.

Years on the job don’t equal seniority.
It's about shipping, learning, and improving.

Senior designers have been through multiple product cycles.
Taking ideas through discovery, design, handoff, measurement, and iteration.

True seniors own the product cycle:
•	Spot weak problem definitions
•	Push back on unfeasible ideas
•	Align stakeholders early
•	Define success metrics
•	Iterate post-launch

They’ve learned from past failures:
• Seen projects cut when potential impact was unclear.
• Poured hours into designs that never shipped.
• Watched scope spiral until teams lost faith.

If you’re aiming to level up this year, this is what ownership looks like:

• Before designing, collect one concrete signal that the problem exists.
A data point, a support ticket, or a customer quote.

• Write the success statement in one sentence:
“If this works, more customers will [action], impacting [product metric], contributing to [business goal].”

• Ask engineering how they would solve the customer need with the lowest technical effort.

• List the top 2–3 reasons the project could fail and share them with a stakeholder for input.

• Design the ideal state and the simplest version that can change behaviour.
Everything between becomes phased releases.

• Set a calendar reminder to review impact and share what changed, what didn’t, and what you’d do next.

Seniority isn’t about time served.
It’s about building habits and judgment that come from owning product cycles.

How are you going to level up this year?

With AI tools, anyone can have a portfolio in React
How I would create a portfolio site for free in 2026:

1. Start by writing the content: intro, about me page, case studies, ideally in markdown. 

2. Get all my images ready for the intro, about me and case studies. 

3. Figma for the general design direction. I wouldn't worry about getting every page in Figma and every single detail, but I would want to define at least the visual identity there (whether I want it to be brutalist, modern, clean, aesthetic, minimalist, black-and-white, colourful, etc.).

4. Add text files, images and rules for LLMs, including front-end skills (eg impeccable.style), in a folder on my computer

5. Open the folder in an AI coding tool (Cursor or Antigravity would be my top choices) and ask it to build the structure for a very simple portfolio site with a homepage and three case studies. I ask to use Vite for faster build times, but it's not essential. 

5. After the initial scaffold is built, I would go component by component (eg, header, then hero, then case study overview, etc), pasting in a component to Cursor and getting it built one by one. Avoiding a one-shot prompt. 

6. Once you have the right structure but missing details, I would try two approaches: a) describing the problem along with screenshots of Figma vs the actual build, and b) using Cursor's design mode, and see which approach you find more efficient to get the details right. 

7) The trickiest part for beginners, but totally worth it: you want to set up a workflow where you push your site to GitHub. To do this, you can try a) doing it all through your AI tool, b) via an app like SourceTree (free and awesome), or c) via the command line (long-term best approach but steep learning curve).  

8) Create a Netlify account and set up an automatic deploy linked to your GitHub repo you just created. Now every time you open a pull request or push to your main branch, Netlify will build your site for you. All that's left is to buy a domain if you haven't got one and point it to Netlify. 

Once you've done all that, you will have a site you can build and host for free, or pay around $20/month for a Cursor subscription. With Antigravity, you could probably do the whole thing for free (minus the cost of your domain subscription). 

Of course, this is very simplified, but sometimes just knowing all the steps and you have to investigate is enough to get started.

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The Battle

Laura Baker

Dan Winer

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Laura Baker's LinkedIn Performance

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