About me

My career so far, strengths, learnings, values and other motivations

My career so far

Key timeline

1998-2006 | Digital Kickoff

NYC. The dot-com boom was gaining momentum, and I found myself right in the middle of it. Combining my industrial and graphic design background with the emerging digital ecosystem came naturally, and before long, I was designing and developing interfaces for web and multimedia projects.

Key Learnings:

Design business management and ownership
Website development – HTML and JS
Multimedia – Flash & Adobe Director
Desktop publishing and digital print
‘Primitive’ UI system design
Startup culture and innovation

Key clients

PWC, ESPN, Ogilvy, Teva Pharmaceuticals, NYC Vets, Binyamina Wines, Hasso Plattner Institute (Berlin), RPP, ISI.

2006-2012 | Growth

Sydney. Continuing as if nothing changed except for the new sounds (hello, kookaburra), scenery and culture.
Website design and development, presentations, multimedia projects and application design (early stages of UX/UI).

Key Learnings:

Australian working culture
Systems thinking and CX
Platform development – Complex financial systems
Management and process development
Multimedia production and publishing
Hands-on production – automation and efficiencies

Clients/ Contracts

TAFE, Wolff Design, Orient Capital, Link Market Services, Hollard, ANZ, STS Stone, Matchboard, Trialia Foods, Remesys, Head-On

2012-2020 | SiteMinder

Startup. A three-month contract ended in an 8-year career growth, fulfilment, success and friendships.
I had the pleasure of embedding design thinking and culture into a fast-paced startup environment. This included building a design team looking after the complete CX lifecycle from awareness, product and customer success. My strategic strength and long-term vision came in handy by envisioning our future platform and solidifying our global brand identity.

Key Learnings:

Sprint cadence, agile and scrum methodologies
Rapid-Design processes and QA
CX and UX framework development
Team building and leadership
From SASS to Global PASS
Embedding HCD and design culture
Quantifying design – cost and ROI

Products and outcomes

Channel Manager, Booking Button, Little Hotelier PMS, Marketplace, Brand strategy and identity, website, UI system, Onboarding and CX, Internal UX, guidelines and audits, IPO.

2020-Current | Lead

Covid. Time to explore new opportunities for product design and development, CX, UX and digital transformation projects. Strategic projects and roles, transitioning to digital-first at AICD and a leadership role with an insurance startup venture. Product strategy, brand and website development consultancy.

Key Learnings:

Stakeholder negotiations
Squad building and digital scrum
The value of HCD
Communicating possibilities
Modernising and digitising legacy systems
The impact of AI

Companies

Prospecta, AICD, Kanopi, Consulting

“Micha is the designer you work with to create simple UX from a complex system, quickly. He helped design SiteMinder when it was a fast growing startup, designing a robust and scalable UX that customers love. The design team still reaps the benefits of this work.”

Heidi Egger

Principal CX Design | SiteMinder

Speed, Adapt and Connect

I am a strong believer in gut feeling and intuition. I tend to work fast, test and refine quickly, sometimes while in production when the risk is low. I can predict a few steps ahead, connect the dots and see common patterns that enable rapid design concepts and the development of new ideas, products and features.

I enjoy taking a step back and viewing the entire ecosystem, finding nuggets of opportunities and areas that require attention.

There are days that I just want to be on the tools. Sketching, designing UI elements, prototyping and even coding.

E2E skill set

Design culture

Design culture is how an organisation understands and applies design across its various teams and functions.

As a design leader, I balance business objectives, available resources and culture.

Design is best shown, not talked about. Having thoughts, notes and creativity displayed in the office walls encourages curiosity and enables all stakeholders to take part of the ideation process.

Product design is not a skill. It is a combined effort of various points of view and knowledge.

Pastime

Some of my latest hobbies and interests

Music

If I could make money from music, I would probably be a musician. When I see a guitar, I have to pick it up and play.

I play blues, rock and pretend I know Jazz. I play acoustic and electric and prefer Fender’s over Gibsons.

You can see me from time to time at gigs around Bondi.

Photography

As a kid, I used to take my dad’s Olympus and just take shots. I had no Idea about exposure or metering but I guess I had an eye for composition and subject.

I’ve been doing semi-professional photography gigs for advertising and events.

I also had an exhibition in Bondi of a black and white large-format photos from an old Rollei 6×6.

Ocean swimming

This is kind of a new hobby. A few stroke correction classes and before long I started swimming long distances in salty, cold water. It is great for mental health as well as resetting a busy day.

My shark encounter fantasies come up quite often during a swim so swimming with others calms me down.

When the weather is brutal a chlorine pool will do.