I never stopped making

Design leader for complex products. I raise craft, build the systems, and ship tooling myself with AI.

Open to design leadership roles across Europe, plus advisory work.

Start a conversation → See the work →
  • Irish citizen · full EU work rights
  • Fluent Dutch
  • Open across Europe
  • Currently in Abu Dhabi
Work · 01 → 04

Selected Work

Four pieces of work where I owned the outcome end to end: finding the real problem, shaping what got built, and shipping it. Real numbers. Real decisions. The calls I would defend in a room.

01
Alef Education · 2022 → Present

Design System and Product Operations

Alef’s platform had grown to over sixty templates with no governance, and product decisions were being made on gut feel. I cut the system to twenty-two disciplined components, then built a feedback analytics dashboard in Claude Code myself: the data pipeline, the chart rendering, and a 0.89 correlation that proved which user complaints actually mapped to drop-off.

€200K saved yearly
60 → 22 templates to components
10 → 3 days to decide

What mattered: the proof of concept became permanent infrastructure.

02
Sanoma Learning · NL · 2018

Strategic Discovery for a 2M+ User Platform

Case study →
03
Alef Education · 2023 → Present

Making an Organisation AI-Native

Case study →
04
Alef Education · 2022 → Present

Building a Team That Ships and Stays

Case study →
Career · 1992 → Now

Four countries, four industries

Three decades of practice, each role adding craft and a sharper sense of how design earns its keep.

1992–2005
Sony Music Europe
Design Lead
Music · NL · UK
2005–2014
Digital Consultancy
Lead UX/UI Designer
Public sector · NL
2014–2017
Freelance
UX/UI Designer
Banking · Belgium
2018–2022
Sanoma Learning
Senior UX Designer
EdTech · NL
2022–present
Alef Education
Head of Design
EdTech · Abu Dhabi
What colleagues say · 01 / 02
Don brings a global design perspective that enhances products and resonates with users worldwide. He also led the charge in integrating AI into the design process, keeping the team innovative and efficient.
Philip Chesney Former Product Manager, Alef Education
Don came in with so much experience, yet he served the younger ones in building up strategic blocks. Really impressed with Don’s constant push to become better in focusing on end users and what they need.
Edwin Persoon Former CTO, Iddink Group (Sanoma Learning)
Leadership · 01 → 06

How I lead

I am Head of Design at Alef Education, leading 17 people across three disciplines and 12 markets. I lead the way I practise: hands in the work, decisions anchored to evidence, and a team that grows faster than the market can recruit it. These are the six principles I operate by, each one earned on a real project.

01

Cut before you build

The hardest design work is removal, not addition. At Alef I reduced a library of 60 templates to 22 governed components. Production cycles dropped 40% and the consolidation saved €200K a year. Removing things is harder than adding them.

02

Depth over breadth

Six well-chosen interviews beat six hundred survey responses when they surface the real pattern. On Magister, six interviews showed that 95% of daily usage sat in just 6 to 10 tasks. That one finding reversed a declining market position and unlocked over €3M in investment.

03

Build the tooling yourself

I ship the systems I ask my teams to imagine, rather than wait for a dev team. I built a feedback analytics dashboard that connected qualitative and quantitative data for the first time, and cut decision cycles from 10 days to 3.

04

Retention comes through growth

People stay where they are visibly progressing, not only where they are well paid. Structured development paths and larger scopes produced zero attrition across a team of 17 over 18 months, in a market that actively recruits my designers.

05

Adapt the communication, not the people

Across 17 people, six nationalities, and 12 markets, one management style applied uniformly fails on contact. I adjust how I deliver context and feedback to each person. The standard itself never moves.

06

Make the results visible

I do not advocate for change, I demonstrate it. When one team cut a research cycle from three days to three hours, the rest of the organisation asked for the same programme. That is how 40 people came through the AI Playbook, and how the design system reached 95% adoption in six months.

Every number above is really a statement about people. Not the design system. Not the dashboard. The team that chose to stay.

Credentials · Writing

Credentials & writing

Professional development

  • UX Management Certification Nielsen Norman Group
  • Strategic Design Leadership Masterclass 96% distinction TU Delft
  • Design Sprint Certification AJ&Smart
  • Information Architecture & Facilitating UX Workshops Nielsen Norman Group
  • Top 10% distinction across multiple UX courses Interaction Design Foundation

Speaking and writing

I publish on LinkedIn three to four times a week

On AI-native design, design systems, and leadership, with a steady readership among European design leaders.

Guest Lecturer, The Hague University of Applied Sciences

Design strategy and professional practice.

Read the writing →
Contact · Open to work

Senior design leadership and advisory across Europe

I lead design at Alef Education in Abu Dhabi. My roots are European: Irish citizen, a base in the Netherlands, fluent Dutch. The right role brings me home. Head of Design, Director of Design, VP of Design.

Start a conversation → linkedin.com/in/doncrowley
Portrait of Don Crowley