DURAN SEARLE,
SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGNER

I’ve worked with Duran closely over the last couple of years in John Lewis and he is an outstanding UX Designer. He’s got a wonderful caring and friendly nature and is really skilled at making sure teams deliver value to customers (and the business). He champions being customer centric and ensures teams gather insight to inform decisions. He’s also really strong with data and analytics, and building key stakeholder relationships across the business to help shape the direction of the product. During our time together, Duran led changes which not only significantly improved the customer experience but also delivered a strong improvement in business metrics, such as revenue.

What I love most about Duran is his passion for bringing the whole team on the journey. He excels at running collaborative sessions and getting early input and feedback from stakeholders or technical engineers. Duran has an excellent approach to communication and very strong presentation skills. This all leads to a really pragmatic and iterative approach.

I would highly recommend Duran!

Duran is an amazing product designer. I had the fortunate opportunity to work with him on multiple occasions and he always brought boundless energy and customer focused thinking which was integral to the success of the products he worked on.

His approach is a pragmatic and personable, he builds rapport and strong relationships with teams that mean he has the backing and support when proposing new or radical ideas, and he crosses disciplines with ease; being able to move from a detailed engineering conversation to high level business strategy with a moments notice.

But above all it’s Duran’s pace that’s key to his impact, he’s able to bring to life visions and ideas rapidly, focusing on the key step change or point of challenge and collaborating with teams to work out how best to solve the customer problem.

Any team will find his services invaluable and I hope we get to work together again and soon

The biggest problem I had with Duran was that everyone wanted him on their team/tribe/stream. Everyone - the stakeholders, the devs, the designers, the business, the researchers.

Irrepressibly cheerful and super sharp; rapidly picking up what the product managers wanted to achieve. He helps them understand other (and better) ways to achieve their goals. Duran can also code (he will shake his head when I say this) but he can - enough to be able to knock out complicated prototypes and to bond with your devs. And to know the actual possible, instead of the art of. He's also meticulous - the dilligence is done, it's documented, it's prototyped, it's explained & demonstrated. There's nothing your team wouldn't know about how the design should be built.

I've hired him in two different companies. I will hire him again. If you get to him first - then you'll have an exceptional player on your team.