I'm a designer who's part PM and speaks fluent engineer.

I defined, measured, and wrote the strategy for an AI Quality Score.

I designed a zero setup onboarding experience for a first-to-market AI voice service.

I helped sales people call 5x more leads and automated their sales pipeline with Sequences.

Craig Dennis —
Product Design Leader

Previously designed for

  • Smith.ai
  • Close
  • BBC
  • ASOS
  • Dell
  • Samsung
  • ITV
The default AI receptionist configuration a customer gets with no setup, illustrating the product-is-the-manual principle

Zero setup AI voice — Creating an "it just works" experience for an AI receptionist service.

Try and describe the structure and flow of the last phone call that you had. I bet you can't. If you were presented with all the options to configure all of it I bet you still couldn't.

It's hard to solve the cold start problem in software. It's even harder when you don't have a mental model for describing what you want.

The most important aspect for me was to deliver an "aha" moment (and therefore value) as soon as possible after payment. I made sure that Smith's AI Receptionist just worked right out of the box.

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Close CRM Sequences builder — a multi-step outreach sequence with call and email steps and scheduling options

Automating Sales Outreach — Rethinking complex sales workflows to reach leads with the press of a button.

Close needed its own sales sequencing before more customers left for competitors' email tools. I designed it inside a six-week shape-up cycle.

The harder follow-on was bringing calling into the same automated cadence: a step only a human can actually carry out.

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Defining and measuring quality for an AI voice experience — Making call quality visible, so a bad week reads as a dip and not a failure.

A single bad early call was the biggest predictor of cancellation — often before a customer had ever heard one of their own real calls.

The product was opaque. Customers couldn't tell a temporary issue from a systemic one, so they assumed the worst and made permanent decisions about temporary problems.

This was a measurement gap, not a support problem. I defined what a good call actually was, and made the score visible.

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Turning 1,400 complaints into one ranked churn list — One ranked churn list, built from complaints scattered across five teams.

Complaints lived in three different places, so every team prioritised from different numbers and the conversations stalled into opinion.

Leadership would post one customer complaint in Slack and we would drop everything. Nobody could say whether it had happened once or four hundred times.

We were prioritising on volume of attention, not frequency of occurrence. I built a pipeline that turned 1,400 scattered complaints into 115 ranked themes.

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From invisible design work to high-impact business influence — Coaching a designer from doing good work to being seen doing it.

The shaping conversations were happening in DMs. When they did share publicly it was a wall of text with no clear ask, and they wondered why nobody engaged.

They believed good work was enough. At a startup where you want a promotion, that belief quietly costs you the promotion.

I gave them a structured communication plan with a timeline and milestones. Nine months later they owned their own initiatives.

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I've seen badly designed things my whole life and always tried to understand why. I learned to think like a designer at university, where I met the idea of constraints and assumptions. Now, when I see something badly designed, I wonder what constraints led to it and what assumptions weren't validated.

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