Tes

Transforming Education Technology Through Product-Led Design.

Role: Global Head of Product Design & UX
Scale: 13M+ educators | 20,000+ schools globally | Multi-product EdTech platform (B2B & B2C)
Scope: End-to-end experience strategy across Tes’s global product ecosystem, spanning recruitment, classroom resources, professional development, and school management tools.

At Tes, I led the transformation of a century-old publishing brand into a modern, product-led SaaS platform serving 20,000+ schools and 13 million teaching professionals globally. My mandate was to create a connected ecosystem of digital products and services, delivering seamless, award-winning experiences while driving commercial growth and operational efficiency.

Alongside embedding accessibility and user-centred design at scale, I began introducing AI-informed workflows and experimentation into research and prototyping practices — laying the foundations for more intelligent personalisation and faster, evidence-led product decisions across both B2B and B2C audiences.

Strategic Impact

  • Multi-year experience strategy: Defined and executed a global UX vision, balancing accessibility, brand alignment, and tailored experiences for educators, schools, and individual users.

    Subscription & revenue growth: Launched Tes Magazine digital subscriptions (+46% YoY) and the Staff Management SaaS package, growing net value from £48m → £68m and supporting private equity exit readiness.

    Design system leadership: Developed the ‘Pencilcase’ design system, reducing design creation time by 60% while unifying visual language and improving delivery consistency across multiple products.

    Experimentation & rapid insight: Introduced Maze for rapid prototyping and user testing, enabling faster validation and reducing product development cycles by 40%.

    Operational UX improvements: Simplified Tes.com navigation, increasing adoption by 60%, reducing bounce rate by 70%, and improving user engagement by 10%.

    Accessibility & inclusion: Embedded WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility practices across design operations, QA, and release pipelines.

Team Leadership & Culture

  • Built and led a remote-first, international UX team, evolving the function into a structured Design and Research organisation, introducing clear discipline ownership and management layers to support scale — delivered without redundancies.

  • Formalised capability across product design, research, and design systems, embedding accessibility compliance and continuous discovery practices to improve quality, consistency, and delivery speed.

  • Raised UX maturity across the organisation, positioning design as a strategic partner to Product and Engineering through evidence-led decision making and cross-functional alignment.

Measurable Outcomes

Initiative

Tes Magazine digital subscriptions

Staff Management subscription

Tes.com UX redesign

Tes Resources content optimisation

Candidate & Job Search rollouts

Cross-sell portal redesign

Rapid testing / Maze integration

Result

+46% YoY; Best Digital Publication award 2022

£20m increase in net value

Adoption +60%, Bounce rate -90%, Engagement +10%

Downloads +10%, Page load times reduced

Self-serve for 200+ schools; smoother applications

Increased adoption of multiple product lines

40% faster product development cycles

Key Takeaways

  • Transformed a content-led organisation into a data-driven, product-led SaaS platform, demonstrating how design directly drives measurable business outcomes.

  • Established experimentation and rapid testing practices, increasing decision confidence, delivery speed, and product impact without additional headcount.

  • Scaled and restructured a multi-disciplinary Design and Research organisation, introducing management layers and discipline ownership to support global growth — delivered without redundancies.

  • Embedded accessibility, inclusivity, and human-centred design as core operating principles, strengthening brand trust and reducing regulatory risk.