I am an enthusiastic, driven, and ambitious designer who wants to create meaningful, long-term impact through the work I do. I am motivated by the idea that good design should not only be aspirational, but also realistic, scalable, and grounded in the contexts in which it exists. I aim to create products and systems that genuinely improve people’s lives, rather than solutions that only work on paper.

For me, design is about synthesising complexity into clarity. I enjoy taking abstract thoughts, messy insights, data, and stakeholder perspectives, and turning them into ideas and concepts that others can clearly understand and engage with. From a young age, I have always enjoyed making and ideating, whether through woodworking, inventing, experimenting, or designing magic tricks. Ideation is still where I feel most at home. I like thinking beyond the obvious solution to create ideas that are interesting, distinctive, and meaningful, while also learning when to let ideas go if they do not serve the bigger picture.

Alongside my creative strengths, my internship strongly shaped my professional identity by grounding my design approach in structure, evidence, and strategy. Working as a Product Management intern at Philips Hue taught me that some of the most important design decisions happen long before anything is designed or built. I learned to think critically about whether a product should exist at all, who it is truly for, and why it deserves a place in the market. This experience helped me connect user needs, business strategy, and technical constraints into clearer and more realistic product directions.

Communication plays a central role in how I work. Through years of debating, including board experience, competitions, and judging, I have developed strong oracy and active listening skills. During my internship, I learned how essential it is to adapt communication to different stakeholders, from being precise and direct with engineers to more exploratory with marketers, and evidence-focused with finance and management. I increasingly see myself as someone who can bridge disciplines, align perspectives, and keep the user at the centre of complex discussions.

My background in mentoring and supporting people with special educational needs continues to shape my design mindset. Supporting a child with Down syndrome and diabetes over several years taught me that inclusion is not about short-term comfort or doing what is easiest in the moment. True inclusion supports independence, confidence, and growth over time. This perspective strongly influences how I approach design, balancing empathy with long-term impact rather than quick fixes.

Through my internship, I have also become much more confident working with data and research. I am now comfortable using insights from large datasets, user reviews, and qualitative and quantitative research to inform decisions. Importantly, I have learned that being user-centred does not mean blindly following what users say, but critically interpreting insights and understanding which needs truly matter. This has shifted my approach from being largely intuition-led to deliberately balancing intuition with evidence.

Currently, my focus lies in user-centred design, stakeholder management, and product strategy, particularly in contexts where decisions have long-term consequences and complexity cannot be ignored. One area I continue to develop is decisiveness. I can become deeply absorbed in ideas, which is often a strength, but I am learning to move forward more confidently, make evidence-based decisions, and accept that progress and learning are often more valuable than perfection.