2026 Professional Summary
Hello, I’m James
I’m a design leader who helps organisations build great in-house teams and digital services
James Cook
Bristol, United Kingdom
Design Leader with 20+ years’ experience delivering software systems, defining design practices, and developing people
hellojames.co.uk • LinkedIn • ADPList
Professional Summary for: humans • robots
Work samples on request
Highlights
- Grew OVO’s practice from 5→50+ and shaped teams, ways of working, and culture
- Established Springer Nature’s global UX community and design operations
- Led Design for Singapore Government’s first large-scale agile transformation
- Mentored 200+ people and interviewed 400+, building inclusive design teams
- Taught accessibility at UXThailand 2024 and Singapore GovTech A11y Week
Expertise
- Building and scaling design capability within large organisations
- UX strategy, design operations, and delivery assurance
- Cross-functional leadership across product, design, and engineering
- Leading research, content, and design in complex agile environments
- Embedding quality, accessibility, and scalability into software delivery
Strengths
- Helping product, design, and engineering work together more effectively
- Influencing prioritisation and trade-offs to align delivery with user needs
- Managing and growing designers, and sustaining communities of practice
- Hiring, team design, and defining effective ways of working
- Adapting approaches to problem spaces, and helping teams work better
- Collaboration, co-design, and iterative delivery across disciplines
- Facilitating workshops for alignment, inception, and shared understanding
- Analytical, structured thinking and pragmatic decision-making
- Rapid visual thinking to explore ideas and build shared ownership
- Framing solution direction, structure, and interaction design
- Guiding teams through organisational and industry change
- Enabling teams with servant leadership
Experience
Design Mentor
2021–Pr • global • ADPList
Lead Consultant
2022–24 • SG / AU • Thoughtworks
Design Operations Lead;
User Experience Practice Lead
2017–21 • UK • OVO Energy
User Experience Lead
2015–17 • UK / DE / IN • Springer Nature
Experience Design Senior Consultant;
Experience Design Consultant
2012–15 • UK / SG / IN • Thoughtworks
User Experience Designer
2011–12 • UK • Loco2 (now RailEurope)
User Experience Analyst
2008–10 • UK • Isotrak
Web Developer
2007–08 • UK • Cambridge Assessment
Freelance
2006–12 Freelance
2006–07 Cyfle/Sequence Digital
2005–06 Afanti Media
Study
Design for Visual Communication PGC
University of the Arts London
Design for Interactive Media BA
University of Wales, Cardiff
Multimedia Product Design HND
Cardiff School of Art & Design
Recognition
2024 & 2025 ADPList Top 100 Mentors
2019 OVO Values Heroes
2016 GovInsider Innovation Awards
2013 Google Global Impact Awards
2006 NESTA Innovate to Educate
People before pixels.