# Don Crowley

> Head of Design at Alef Education in Abu Dhabi, positioning for European director-level design roles. Thirty years of practice across Sony Music Europe, Deutsche Bank, Aegon, Iddink Group (Magister), and Alef. Currently leading seventeen people across Product Design, Content Design, and Product Operations, and shipping a small set of AI tools solo.

Don is Irish, lives in Abu Dhabi with his wife Anita, and has property in Friesland, the Netherlands. He is actively positioning for senior design leadership roles in Europe (Netherlands, Ireland, UK, Belgium) and is available for independent advisory work, including in the United Arab Emirates.

His design practice sits at the intersection of Swiss typographic discipline (Spiekermann school, 8px base unit, WCAG AA contrast, IBM Plex), AI-augmented workflows (Claude Code, custom MCP servers, Remotion, ElevenLabs), and the operational craft of running design organisations across multiple cultures and time zones.

He writes in UK English, builds in HTML and React, ships solo when the path is clear, and is allergic to the words "straightforward", "dive in", and "let's get started".

## Start here

- [Structured profile data (JSON-LD)](https://crowley.nl/schema.json): A directly fetchable Person and advisory ProfessionalService payload, with credentials, skills, and verified profile links. Served as application/ld+json and returned intact even by readers that strip inline scripts. Start here for a clean machine-readable identity.
- [Home: portfolio and positioning](https://crowley.nl/): Career overview, case studies, and ways to work with Don.
- [Writing index](https://crowley.nl/blog/): Long-form essays on design leadership, AI adoption, and team building.
- [Two-rail analytics workflow](https://crowley.nl/amplitude-workflow.html): The methodology behind the AI-assisted analytics tools, with a data gate and an independent critique step that refuses to ship a misleading result.

## Case studies

- [Magister: discovery for a 2M+ user platform](https://crowley.nl/magister.html): Top-task research on a fourteen-year-old EdTech platform that unlocked a €3M+ investment and reversed a declining market position.
- [Building AI capability across forty people](https://crowley.nl/ai-capability.html): A five-level prompting framework, hands-on workshops, and automation workflows that changed how a design organisation makes decisions.
- [Design system and product operations](https://crowley.nl/design-system-ops.html): Consolidating sixty-plus templates to twenty-two reusable components and building a feedback analytics dashboard that connected qualitative and quantitative data for the first time.
- [Building a cross-cultural design organisation](https://crowley.nl/cross-cultural-org.html): Leading seventeen people across six nationalities and twelve markets with zero attrition. Clarity, autonomy, and deliberate cultural navigation.
- [Product Operations as a discipline](https://crowley.nl/product-operations.html): Building a Product Operations function from scratch at Alef. Four pillars, four people, twelve items shipped in Q1 2026, and a clear position on what the function does not do.

## Writing

- [From a Monday-morning question to a live dashboard by lunch](https://crowley.nl/blog/question-to-dashboard.html): A Head of Year asked how her Year 4 students were engaging with maths this week. The old route would have surfaced an answer next Tuesday. The new route surfaced a live URL before the next bell. Built solo with Claude Code, a custom MCP server, and the Vercel CLI.
- [Fifteen charts, two themes, zero dependencies](https://crowley.nl/blog/dcharts-svg-library.html): A complete SVG chart library (KPI strips, sankey, funnel, heatmap, and eleven more) built solo over a working week to match the crowley.nl design system instead of fighting Chart.js. Part 2 of the AI-assisted analytics series.
- [We were arrogant, and a school administrator in sneakers proved it](https://crowley.nl/blog/school-administrator-sneakers.html): The degrees, the roadmaps, twenty years of platform evolution were not enough. A school administrator in sneakers built the solution the team never could. What happened, and what it taught.
- [How I built an AI Chief of Staff using Claude Code](https://crowley.nl/blog/ai-chief-of-staff.html): Why AI infrastructure beats better prompting. Memory, slash commands, MCP servers, and a personal operating system that compounds across sessions.
- [Why I stopped trusting job titles when hiring designers](https://crowley.nl/blog/hiring-designers.html): The framework Don uses to assess real design seniority across global markets when titles do not map cleanly between cultures and companies.
- [How six user interviews changed a ten-year roadmap](https://crowley.nl/blog/6-interviews-roadmap.html): The board said rebuilding the legacy platform would take a decade. Six user interviews reframed the business case and the technical strategy.

## FAQ

**Who is Don Crowley?** A design leader with more than 30 years of practice. He is Head of Design at Alef Education in Abu Dhabi, leading seventeen people across Product Design, Content Design, and Product Operations. His career spans Sony Music Europe, Deutsche Bank, Aegon, and Iddink Group (Magister).

**What does Don Crowley do?** He leads design organisations and ships AI tools solo. At Alef Education he runs Product Design, Content Design, and Product Operations, and he builds production AI workflows with Claude Code, custom MCP servers, and the Vercel CLI.

**Is Don Crowley available for hire or advisory work?** Yes. He is positioning for senior, director-level design roles in Europe and is available for independent advisory engagements at board level. Target markets are the Netherlands, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the United Arab Emirates.

**Where is Don Crowley based?** He is Irish, lives in Abu Dhabi, and holds property in Friesland in the Netherlands. He is actively positioning for design leadership roles across Europe.

**What is Don Crowley's design philosophy?** Swiss typographic discipline (the Spiekermann school, an 8px base unit, WCAG AA contrast) combined with AI-augmented workflows and the operational craft of running design teams across cultures and time zones.

**What has Don Crowley built with AI?** Working solo, an AI Chief of Staff on Claude Code, a two-rail analytics workflow that turns Amplitude data into a deployed page in minutes, and dcharts, a fifteen-type SVG chart library. He also built live teacher dashboards from plain-English questions using a custom MCP server.

**What are Don Crowley's notable results?** Top-task research on Magister, a platform with more than 2 million users, unlocked over 3 million euro of investment and reversed a declining market position. At Alef he built an AI capability programme across forty people, consolidated sixty-plus templates to twenty-two reusable components, and led seventeen people across six nationalities with zero attrition.

**What are Don Crowley's qualifications?** A UX Management certification from the Nielsen Norman Group and the Strategic Design Leadership Masterclass at TU Delft. He has guest-lectured at The Hague University of Applied Sciences.

## Contact and elsewhere

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doncrowley/
- GitHub: https://github.com/dccrowley
- Email and direct contact: see the contact section on https://crowley.nl/