FJ van Wingerde

Principal Design Lead
Pragmatic Solutions for Complex Challenges

“...and I believe he is one of a very small band of people who can do it. If you have a hard design problem, you should hire him if you can.”

Chief Product Officer, LinkedIn Recommendation

“FJ truly exemplifies what it means to be an inspirational leader, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with him.”

Senior UX Designer, LinkedIn Recommendation

Let Me Help You Make Better Products

Solving complex product design challenges by bringing stakeholders, domain experts, users, designers, product creators, and developers together

I have grown from working on single products to transforming product portfolios. I identify the blockages in the organization that stand in the way of making good, sustainable Product decisions. I work with decision makers at the highest levels down to execution to align everyone for success.
I have repeatedly helped companies reach the key metrics for their digital products by helping them clarify goals, delivering clear designs, and working closely with all delivery teams.
I have created user experiences for 25 years, first as a developer, then as a UX designer, researcher, lead, and director. Because of this history, my designs and guidance are always grounded in technical reality and I communicate well with technical teams. I am that rare bridge between design and execution.
I mentor, coach, lead, and line-manage designers and teams, and have never stopped designing. I am well-known for thinking beyond simple personas and superficial use-cases, and always advocating for more inclusion of, and empathy with, users and designers.
I have worked in all kinds of environments and team shapes, from multi-nationals to a startup, agency or in-house, in multiple countries and cultures. I have used many tools (HTML/CSS, Axure, Sketch, Figma, Miro, Jira, Confluence, Trello, AI generators etc.) and I know what works to create good UX.

Selected Work

Strategic initiatives that transformed how millions interact with complex digital systems across healthcare, finance, science publishing, and emerging technologies.

Latest work: design leadership

As Domain Lead UX for the Research Domain at Springer Nature, I was responsible for the UX of the two main academic research websites that hosted all of the science that libraries subscribe to. Here is some of the work I either led the design on or designed myself.

Creative Leadership

Team Leadership

Mentorship

Hands-on

From concept to release

Accessibility
Leadership: Unifying a sprawling platform

Multiple brands. Multiple journeys. No clarity on what was where. No way to personalize. Innovation duplicated on multiple sites. Springer Nature needed a change.
A description of how to manage a company-wide change of digital direction. ‍

Strategic vision

Creative Leadership

Stakeholder Management

Concept work

Storytelling
Leadership: Organizing designers to win in different team set-ups

Embedding a single Product Designer per product team is the current default way of working, but sometimes there are other ways of organizing that are more productive. I describe two different situations and how I organized designers around them.

Team Leadership

Organizational Design

Team Optimization

Experimentation
Product: Unlocking hidden value to an online medical encyclopedia

Can we turn corpus of deeply valuable but hidden and obscure medical stand-alone reference books into an online, linked, valuable experience?

Hands-on

From concept to release

Creative Direction

Storytelling
Products: Historical trajectory

Three more cases, all from before 2017, to illustrate my trajectory and contributions.

Stakeholder Management

Concept work

Hands-on

Team Leadership

Creative Direction

Storytelling

What I can do for you

Plan

Get all stakeholders to agree on a vision for your overall Product Experience, the success metrics, and the plan for how to get there.

Lead

Select, hire, lead, grow, mentor, and organise your designers
Structure and assign the work for design success
Match designers to the right teams and nurture their cooperation

Ideate

Explore brand new concepts:

workshops and ideation
design sprints
design studio,

with special considerations towards inclusivity, accessibility, and equity

Design

Create breakthrough products: journey mapping, information architecture, wireframes, prototypes
Fix existing poor user experiences
Align user journeys for maximum user success

Improve

Identify if, and then which, product research practices are missing to have your teams truly understand your customer and make good product decisions.
Work with your cross-functional teams to get the best out of design and their designers.
Improve accessibility and safeguard other legal compliance and risks

Standardize

Work on standardising

processes and practices
documentation
tooling, including Generative AI tools
design systems

so that designers can be on-boarded quicker and deliver faster to an upgraded, uniform standard.

Testimonials

Zeugnis

In German business culture it is customary for the employeer to prepare a letter of reference for the employee that exhaustively lists their tasks and responsibilities, together with an evaluation of how the duties were fulfilled. I have scanned the reference Springer Nature prepared for me, and added an English translation.
Spoiler: my way of working is "always characterized by a very high level of conscientiousness and reliability" and I'm also "always valued for [my] technical expertise and helpful nature."
‍

I invite you to see the positive recommendations colleagues have left for me on LinkedIn in the course of my career.

FJ van Wingerde

Let Me Help You Make Better Products

Selected Work

Latest work: design leadership

Leadership: Unifying a sprawling platform

Leadership: Organizing designers to win in different team set-ups

Product: Unlocking hidden value to an online medical encyclopedia

Products: Historical trajectory