I didn’t start in design.
My first career was in recruitment. For several years I watched how organisations actually make decisions: who gets heard, who gets overlooked, and how trust is built in rooms where authority isn’t evenly shared.
At the time it felt like business experience. Looking back, it was an early education in systems and human behaviour. I moved into UX in 2017, drawn by a simple belief: products should make sense to the people using them.
In product design, since 2017
On large platforms at Flutter and JD Sports
Designers worked to my process framework
Designers led through a leadership gap
Experience
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2017 – 2018
Freelance and a studio placement
Redesigned the information architecture of Wilcocks & Wilcocks’ website, an asset and wealth management firm, then a self-initiated placement at the Norman & Sons studio. Alongside recruitment until I left it for good in September 2017.
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2018 – 2022
Paddy Power Betfair (Flutter Entertainment), UX Designer, mid-weight from 2020
Over four years on large-scale products in complex, regulated environments. Where I learned how constraints shape decisions, and why systems thinking matters when the stakes are high.
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2022 – 2026
JD Sports, Senior Product Designer
Nearly four years on the platform systems underneath a large consumer ecommerce product: authentication, navigation, payment integrations, and localisation across multiple markets. Rarely the most visible parts of a product. Often the parts that decide whether the experience holds together or falls apart. As the only designer on my projects, I worked at lead level throughout.
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Now
Open to Senior and Lead roles
Permanent or contract. North West hybrid, London, or remote.
- Consumer ecommerce
- Betting & gaming
- Authentication
- Payments
- Localisation
- Design systems
How I work
Most of my time is spent before design begins.
I work with engineers, product managers, payment partners, brand specialists and operations teams. Different priorities are inevitable. Alignment is not. Good design work often comes from helping those views meet around a shared understanding of the problem, before anyone opens a design tool.
I bring service design methods into how I approach problems: journey mapping, blueprinting, cross-channel thinking. They’re most useful when the complexity lives in the gaps between touchpoints rather than inside a single screen.
Over time I turned this into a repeatable framework, built from scratch and introduced to the team at JD Sports. More than ten designers worked to it across every major project. It covers kickoff, research, UX, UI, testing and handoff, with accessibility threaded through rather than bolted on at the end.
I rewrote how work came into the team.
The Jira intake template had a field called ‘Solution’, where stakeholders described what they wanted built before design was involved. I replaced it with fields for problem framing, user context and business rationale. Design now entered at the problem, not the solution.
Leadership
Five months leading the team, without the title.
From December 2024 the team had no Head of Design in place. For five months I led the four-person team, then handed it over when a new Head of Design joined in April 2025. The role was unofficial, but the work wasn’t.
- TeamRan stand-ups and weekly one-to-ones for four designers
- PrioritiesOwned prioritisation and roadmap decisions across the team
- OnboardingGot two new starters to full speed within a month
- StakeholdersPresented the team’s work to SLT and C-level
- QualityRan a weekly design review to hold quality without taking ownership away
- CultureStarted a monthly Innovation Hub where designers presented anything that interested them
The harder part was keeping the team steady without a manager in place. I held direct conversations when they were needed, and was honest about what I could and couldn’t push for. The team delivered through it. Projects moved. Stakeholder confidence held.
Beyond delivery
I’ve mentored designers at several points in my career, focusing on how they think rather than what they produce: how to work upstream, frame problems before proposing solutions, and build credibility with people outside design. Three designers I mentored at JD Sports have mentioned that work in their LinkedIn recommendations.
I’ve also been building AI into how I work: using it to synthesise research, stress-test assumptions and surface complexity earlier. I wrote a short book on this approach, and I’ve started bringing shared prompt frameworks into how teams work, not just individuals.
Becoming a dad in 2025 sharpened something I already believed: the most meaningful work outlasts the release cycle. That goes for the products we build, the systems we leave behind, and the designers we help along the way.
I write about design, decision-making and the work behind the work at richardilott.com/thoughts. There’s also a free library of playbooks for design teams at richardilott.com/books.