Oqton
This is the longer story behind the Oqton entry on my work timeline. It's the initiatives and the achievements, told in more detail than a single career card can hold. It traces the arc of the role: arriving in marketing and brand, moving into design operations, then into product design, and finally into AI, where my design background and my engineering instincts finally pulled in the same direction.
Marketing Design
Event Design
Leveraging previous experience using Adobe InDesign and Photoshop to pull together rich graphics from various sources into a clean CMYK document set, matching the specifications expected by booth builders.
Website Design
Building a TypeScript/Gatsby marketing website hooked into a business-friendly CMS in WordPress, as well as gated content for things like webinars and whitepapers. Working with a talented website engineer and supporting the effort by building review workflows, translation setups and visitor information capture.
Social Media Design
Building rich and engaging social media post media on typically tight turnarounds and reviewing with business-wide stakeholders. Gently evolving the brand and the way we talk about our products.
Brand Design
Managing and evolving our company and product branding by keeping the design language clear across the board. Logos, typefaces, colour palettes and all the rest of the Oqton design brand book. Building a brand touchpoint for sales and external collaborators. Eventually handing off all brand and marketing design to a design agency so I could focus on where I could add more value, in the world of product design.
Design Operations
Figma Plugins
Designing, coding and deploying meaningful TypeScript Figma plugins to drastically improve the pace of working in Figma. Evolving the way we work in Figma and building tools to capture conversations, declare intent and provide information structure across massive FigJam boards.
Design → Packaged Icons
Building a quick and simple toolset to turn arrays of thousands of custom icons into packages ready for implementation into a deeply complex Windows engineering tool. Naming enforcement, metadata and dimension auditing, and specific format delivery.
Product Design
Manual Scheduling
Breaking down a complex and highly targeted scheduling solution into a broader, more approachable one for a much wider audience of customers. Re-designing how interactions with the schedule were made, and managing the project through to completion. Touching base with customers along the way to ensure the project was heading in a meaningful direction, delivering value, on time.
These design efforts were coupled with a significant change to the way we stored scheduling data, which came out of a deep design discovery effort. This change dissolved a number of technical-debt problems and significantly reduced the load on the database architecture at the time.
Alerts
Re-thinking how users define alert types in our MES solution and significantly expanding the available data points and mechanisms to really give power to the user. This in turn enabled more meaningful insights into the current state of their operations. It was all packaged up in a tidy and progressive UI that led the user through the process organically. Exposing a complex and rich capability progressively removed the daunting nature of the complexity within, while revealing other alerting opportunities.
Manufacturing Plans
A project with the objective of creating flexibility when it comes to processing various parts simultaneously: how those relationships could be managed and how that impacted the rest of production. Totally re-thinking how some of our item concepts related to each other, and presenting the desired flexibility to our customers. Again, with this project and many others, working closely with our valued customers and gaining valuable feedback that shaped the feature's experience and capability.
Manufacturing Models
Defining how a build could be made repeatable with a strong sense of auditability, to ensure that repeat manufacturing could be achievable in such a complex MES system. Sadly this feature was discussed with customers, and the design finalised, before my time at Oqton ended. I never got to see it implemented.
Permeating Template Changes Through In-Flight Parts
Enabling operations managers to make changes to manufacturing templates and have those changes permeate through to in-flight, not-yet-manufactured parts. This involved a delicate dance between various levels of the platform and, although it could have dramatic ramifications if not executed elegantly, we built a very robust pipeline to unlock this capability safely for our customers.
AI
Digital Warehouse Greenfield
Taking a proven workflow concept that was spawned through a tight relationship with a customer, and building it from scratch with new AI-focused workflows, we created a genuinely production-ready app in a matter of weeks. The objective was to build a recognisable experience, off the back of the workflows we'd built elsewhere, in an entirely new project. Ensuring that what we created was not a vibe-coded index.html file but a fully working, API-led experience that could be deployed at scale on our existing infrastructure. This re-wrote the playbook on how we worked as a team, and spread the capability of each squad member to span design and engineering alike. Ensuring a clean design throughout was the toughest challenge, but was backed up eventually by a set of well-thought-out rules and documents that enabled various agentic workflows to build features that felt like part of the same tool.
AI Educator
Being constantly on the forefront of the AI revolution meant it was my responsibility to educate my fellow colleagues in best practices, as well as inspire them to play and get comfortable in this new ecosystem. This resulted in a large number of skills, agent-swarms and, seemingly most importantly, a shared UX knowledge brain. Perhaps better described as a rich, word-first information architecture that could be ingested by any colleague's AI of choice to produce related content, progressive meaning on new features, and all of it tied back to the essence of the organisation.