Oh, Hello Person!
I have a catalogue of strategic and design expertise that I apply for clients looking to evolve or transform or get closer to their customers – whether that be creating an actionable strategic roadmap, developing a value proposition for a specific customer demographic, defining an innovation framework, visualising a complex service map, defining a customer experience, or designing the UX and UI of a responsive website or app.
As well as strategic problem solving, my background in design enables me to adapt from building transformational multi-departmental strategies to hands-on brand design and UX, UI, service, product and presentation design. I have strong commercial awareness and a solid understanding of back-end and front-end development.
I connect practical solutions to business objectives, identify new opportunities for growth and add value wherever possible. As well as well-thought through design solutions, I believe in reasoning, research, open communication and good planning.
A brand is not a logo. A brand is about who you are; your values and being able to articulate your purpose and reason for being. Companies I work with tend to fall into 3 categories, 1) A new company looking to go to market, 2) An established company looking to evolve, 3) An established company that over time, has lost its reason for being.
Along with research on customers and market positioning, I help these companies succinctly define their purpose and identify ways for them to connect their services to the right customers through their unique value proposition, tone of voice and messaging. I also develop concept brand visuals to help communicate the brand story before it moves to a full brand design process.
I often work with companies that need to evolve their digital products or services (websites, apps etc). Part of my role in their transformation is to understand how the customer interacts with their products within their digital buyer journey. This involves research around customer needs and behaviours as well as reviewing the user experience of existing products in the market.
My background as a designer enables me to translate the customer needs into product functions, this sometimes takes the form of digital strategy summary and other times it can be lo-fi prototype, wireframes or a concept visual that addresses the customer needs.
Defining a long term vision and short term objectives to get you there is one of the foundational elements a business needs. The vision is your moral compass and helps keep you travelling in the right direction; it helps create alignment among senior stakeholders; it helps you communicate that direction to customers and employees; and it helps keep you focussed in a world of distractions.
As well as a general design thinking process, I use a number of other tools to extract the goals and ambitions of a business; I research the context of the business and its organisational capability to deliver and then I use this data to frame a vision that is aspirational but most importantly, achievable. A vision helps you build alignment at a senior level, but a meaningful and aspirational vision will also help employees engage more with the business.
Innovation, transformation, growth – essentially they all represent a need for ‘continued relevance’. I work with companies to find new growth opportunities, sometimes this is surfacing a new product or service, sometimes it is discovering a new market and sometimes it is simply reframing a proposition or focussing on specific customers instead of trying to ‘please everyone’.
I design solutions based on what the client needs and this can vary from a Google Sheets roadmap to a process diagram to a playbook for innovation. The solutions is always delivered in a format that tells the story in the most accessible means to the client.
Service design maps and journey maps can really help to tell the story of how a business works, where the pain points are and how to make improvements. But the final output is created based on customer research, employee interviews and surveys, market perceptions, product-market fit and many other points of data.
Service maps can help connect teams that work in silo; it can help bring the intangible human processes to life and it can demonstrate clear points of risk or opportunity. I have designed service and journey maps for everything from a new business development process to an end-to-end patient experience.
I generally use a standard design thinking process but I have also added to this with a number of processes from other methodologies that have proven to consistently enable clients to succinctly and authentically communicate their vision and mission, understand their value to customers, develop employee engagement programmes, understand their customer behaviours, build innovation playbooks, create communication and marketing roadmaps and validate new product concepts.
I am a passionate person, I care about what I do and I care about supporting the people I work with. I’m interested in human behaviour, philosophy, psychology and learning new skills; I am an inquisitive person which is largely why I do what I do! I’m empathetic, diplomatic and interested in alternative points of view. I consider myself to be level-headed, sensible, approachable and reliable.
Hello Person is a hybrid strategic, research and design consultancy focussed on defining, communicating and delivering the underlying authenticity and value of a brand, product or service to the right customers.
I have held both Director and advisory Non-Executive Director roles over my 20 year career. I have worked alongside CEO’s, CTO’s, CMO’s and other senior leadership team members, working together to define the strategic direction of the business, identifying growth opportunities and working through commercial and cultural challenges alike.
I have Founded and Co-Founded a number of companies as well as a Professional Services Network of Businesses consisting of 4 distinct companies within it. When I work with Founders or Owner-Managed businesses I am often able to add value in multiple areas due my range of experience and lessons I have learned the hard way.
I am a designer at heart – working out how to solve intangible problems and staring at a blank canvas when there are no known answers is my bread and butter – its the world I grew up in during the dot com boom and bust years. Learning to adapt to changing technologies and market forces and asking the ‘what if’ questions is the fun part!
If you are working through some of the challenges of operating a modern business in an ever changing world and need some support, then get in touch to see how I can help hello@helloperson.co.uk