Hey, I’m Buzz! I’m a Product Designer with 19+ years creative experience and a love of creating collaborative business tools. I help designers achieve success on their own terms, build tools that enable teams to work more effectively, and produce creative strategy to help businesses be awesome.
I’m also a dad to two lovely boys, husband to a talented graphic designer and a lover of the outdoors, ocean and motorbikes ✌🏼
Projects
- JIRA by AtlassianOne of my major responsibilities whilst at Atlassian was the re-design of JIRA — a now 15 year old issue and project tracking tool used by millions. Used primarily by software teams, JIRA is the powerhouse behind companies like NASA, Spotify, and pretty much every team I’ve ever worked with. As anyone whose ever used JIRA knows… it’s really hard to master. Once you have it figured, you can do some amazing things — but the barrier to entry is high. And in an increasingly saturated marketplace, sm
- PrevueIn 2007, as a freelance designer, I was having trouble presenting design concepts to my clients in the browser. Sending JPGs over email, or presenting from multi-page PDFs didn't do a great job at showing my work to its full potential — plus email was a terrible way to gather contextual feedback. So I built my own solution, Prevue. Through constant progression, iteration, reinvention and plenty of late nights — Prevue now serves as the concept sharing and feedback platform for over 30,000 designers and agencies worldwide. It is, and always has been, a project built and managed solely by myself. Read more
- SendleMy role as Head of Product was to work alongside the executive team, board and investors to help define the long-term vision for the Sydney-based startup, and build the product strategy necessary to deliver on that. I also oversaw all feature development and had end-to-end involvement in the research, spec, design and implementation of new features.
- Campaign Monitor Email BuilderOne of the biggest challenges for designers and marketers is the complexity involved in building HTML email templates. Coding mobile-responsive emails that work cross-browser is difficult… but making them look good too is next to impossible. There are existing tools, but all of them provide create cookie-cutter templates and hard-to-use interfaces. Campaign Monitor saw an opportunity to do better. In what was one of the most challenging tasks of my career, I was tasked with designing an easy way for anyone to design a beautiful, bespoke email that matches their brand, works everywhere, and doesn’t require a knowledge of HTML. As the head of Product Design, I led a team of designers and developers to build a WYSIWYG editor today used by thousands of customers to send millions of beautiful emails.
- Campaign MonitorOne of my first jobs as Creative Director at Campaign Monitor was to consider the long term brand image of the company. At the time, the logo and website didn't reflect the core values of the business, or the future plans of the product — my brief was to give the brand a “refresh”. Campaign Monitor is a company with world-class customer support at their core, so one of the main things I wanted to achieve was to bring a more ‘human’ feel to the brand. I needed to represent the product as a respectable market leader, whilst giving the brand a touch of fun and personality. Over the course of several years, I led several in-house design teams to protect and progress the brand through a multitude of different mediums.
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Work history
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Principal DesignerHelp Scout
Berry NSW 2535, AustraliaFull Time
After a brief hiatus I'm back helping the Help Scout team bring AI, automation and a whole new Inbox experience to their customers. Bringing some fresh eyes and a bit of lived experience back to the mix, I've come back swinging... launching a new version of their design system, a re-designed core product, and some fresh new visual styles. Back in my element.
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Design Coach & Startup AdvisorYour Friend Buzz
Sydney, AustraliaFreelance
Through my advisory practice I have coached hundreds of high-performing designers and creative individuals — helping them navigate tricky spots in their career and find clarity and purpose in moments of opportunity. I lead with honesty and humility, and aim to help designers uncover success on their own terms.
In this capacity I’ve had the privilege of coaching design leaders from the likes of Canva, Atlassian, Facebook, Webflow, Shopify, Wordpress and some amazing high-performing startups!
I also facilitate design reviews for small tech teams — collaborating with designers on concepts, ideas and coaching individuals towards producing their best work. I also advise portfolio companies of one of Australia’s largest VC firms — helping CEOs create effective design organizations.
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Skills
- Html
- Prototyping
- UX Design
- UI Design
- Mentoring
- User Testing
- Growth Platform Marketing
- Visual Design
- Iconography
- Product Design
Education
Graphic Design
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