Hi, I’m Chris Moorehead. I’m an experienced senior design leader with proven expertise in building, scaling, and enabling collaborative, high-performing design teams, as well as facilitating complex cross-functional product development initiatives. I build great design teams from scratch, or take existing teams and make them even better.
I am a professional engineer (P Eng) and graphic designer (RGD) with over ten years in design leadership, primarily in the cloud-based financial technology (SaaS) and management consulting industry sectors.
Recent Case Studies
Leadership Highlights
Vision & Strategy
▸ Built high-performing design teams from the ground up at two multinational accounting, consulting, and professional services firms.
▸ Grew a small team of designers siloed by product into a significantly expanded globally distributed UX team consisting of Product Design, Design Operations, UX Research, UX Content (technical writing and documentation), and Localization (translation).
▸ Led the ongoing transformation of Caseware from a development-driven to a user-focused organization, functioning as a champion and evangelist for the value of UX throughout the product development process, and providing design thought leadership across the company.
Operational Excellence
▸ Restructured the Product Design team to improve operational efficiency, provide designers with broad cross-platform experience, and improve consistency in the look and feel of the company’s products and platforms.
▸ Operationalized Caseware’s design system, leading the development of its component libraries, patterns, use cases, and code base, and ensuring all elements meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility guidelines.
▸ Integrated translation memory databases into Caseware’s translation software platform, reducing text requiring manual translation by 94% and dramatically improving the quality, speed, consistency, and efficiency of every translation job.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
▸ Redesigned the design process framework and architecture to reduce the length of the design phase of the software development life cycle and improve collaboration with other teams.
▸ Established a cross-functional collaboration model for the Product/Design/Engineering triad, eliminating silos among functional areas, and resulting in improved communication, decision making, and effectiveness at solving complex problems along with a significant decrease in technical and design debt.
Focus on the Customer
▸ Created an entirely new UX Research competency by demonstrating the need for and value of research, and integrated continuous UX research into every stage of product development.
▸ Developed a robust user testing program with users of Caseware products, as well as with users of competitor products.
Mentoring & Management
▸ Made key team leadership hires as well as recognizing, developing, and promoting existing talent into leadership positions.
▸ Developed a system for career development using parallel management and individual contributor career tracks, with clear guidelines for progression and corresponding performance criteria.
▸ Increased employee engagement across the UX team from 58% to 77% and reduced employee turnover to zero.
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Chris isn’t just a leader; he’s a visionary architect, meticulously crafting a design team that rivals the greats.
Sanjali Sharma, Senior UX Designer
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One of Chris’ greatest strengths is his ability to foster a collaborative and inclusive environment within his team. He empowers team members to share ideas, experiment with new approaches, and push the boundaries of creativity—all while maintaining a keen focus on achieving business objectives.
Michael Tretiak, Senior UX Designer
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Chris is an outstanding leader who excels in guiding a team through challenging timelines and complex product areas.
Marlene Aubin, Product Design Manager
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Chris has everything one would wish for in a leader: he provides advice and guidance where needed, empowers his team members and helps them work through challenges.
Nadya Kirillova, Localization Project Manager
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Chris fostered a collaborative and supportive work environment, where every team member felt valued and motivated to do their best.
Louise Bonnamy, UX Research Manager
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