Product Design
B2B
Tradify is a field service management platform used by trade businesses across New Zealand, Australia and UK. Over the past year I worked across product feature design, a growing design system, and an AI-assisted workflow to accelerate research synthesis and delivery.
3 min read
UI UX Designer
B2B
Tradify helps trade businesses across New Zealand, Australia, and the UK run their work, from the first quote to the final invoice.
I spent a year there as a designer. This is the story of how I worked, and why the company made that way of working possible.
Tradify made a deliberate bet: become the most AI-ready company in New Zealand. That meant real tools, real access, and real trust. Here's how that shaped the way I work.
Claude handles the work that doesn't need judgment. Generating and testing label variants. Auditing designs against system rules. Catching inconsistencies before they reach review. Hours recovered. Redirected into decisions that actually require a human.
Figma Make shifted ideation from three directions to thirty. Stronger picks, made faster, with more confidence behind them.
BigQuery cut the guesswork. Live data, queried directly. Designs grounded in what users actually do, not assumptions, not waiting on a report.
Then there's Devin. It knows our codebase in detail, which helps me make better calls where design meets engineering. With it and GitHub, I now can write and ship my own technical tickets. A developer reviews the work, but the code, the scope, and the solution start with me.
None of this replaces design judgment, but it clears the path so there's more room for it.
Day to day, we work in Shape Up cycles, the method built by Basecamp. Four weeks of focused work, then two weeks to: tools down with retrospectives and one tools up with skill sharpening.
The team is small on purpose. One designer, one PM, one PO, and a handful of engineers. Everyone has a clear role and nobody works in a silo.
Cycles start with everyone in the same room. PM knows the goal. Nobody else does. The brief lands deliberately vague, designers and engineers hearing it together for the first time.
The team explores the problem and finds the answer. Nothing pre-decided, nothing handed down.
First two weeks are mine to win or lose. Research, flows, wireframes, prototypes, days, not weeks. The faster I move, the sooner engineers can build.
So I stay close to them the whole time. What's possible, what to cut, what delivers the most value, worked out together, as we go.
The Mobile Job List overhaul shows how this plays out. The goal was simple to say and hard to do: make managing jobs on a phone faster and easier for tradespeople out on the tools.
I confirmed the research and flows with stakeholders inside the first few days, and had prototypes in front of the engineers before week one was done.
Moving this fast only works if there's something solid holding it all together. So alongside the cycle work, I led a full rebuild of Tradify's design system.
The old one needed more than a tidy-up. I rebuilt it on Figma's modern tooling: variables, tokens, and components nested inside other components. This is what makes consistency real. Not a rule everyone tries to remember, but something the system enforces on its own. Change one token and everything built on top updates with it. Nothing is hardcoded, and nothing drifts out of line.
I built it from the smallest pieces up. Colour and type first, then everything else drawn from those few core values.
The timing wasn't an accident. Tradify is moving to React, and the new team needed a system to build against from day one, not one bolted on later. The rebuilt library became that base. The React code now points straight to it as the single source of truth, so design and code stay in step as the product grows.
