Head of UX & Product Design · Hybrid Barcelona & London, or Remote · UK & EU right to work
UX and Product Design Leadership for SaaS, AI, and Enterprise Products.Complex products, simple UX.
Hi, I'm Derry Birkett. I help SaaS and AI companies decide what to build from research, not opinion, then ship it through design systems teams actually use. Now Head of Product Design at Capcade. Before that I led UX at CloudBees and design systems at Oracle NetSuite.I'm Derry, Head of Product Design at Capcade. I led UX at CloudBees and design systems at Oracle NetSuite, and I still ship the hard stuff myself.
I work best where depth matters: untangling information architecture, building research rigour, and setting the quality standards that make the team around me better.
Four anchor cases show the through-line: organisation design at CloudBees, enterprise systems at Oracle Netsuite, 0→1 product work at Exabyte, and full-stack UX leadership at Telanto.
I write about design systems, UX maturity, and AI-assisted product work, and keep a blog archive of demos and experiments when the idea needs to be felt rather than explained.
Monokit 1.6: seven Productivity blocks, from a todo list to a Gantt timeline, each ready to take your data.
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From Card to Done
Monokit 1.5: the demo app gets Projects, a whole task workflow built from the kit's blocks.
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The Palette in the Frame
Monokit 1.4: ⌘K searches the whole kit from any page, and the sign-in links lead to real pages.
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Placeholders That Do Something
Monokit 1.3: working kanban, inbox and calendar blocks, front end only, and a Team page in the demo app.
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The Pages Behind the Avatar Menu
Monokit 1.2: eleven more blocks, and Account, Billing and Notifications pages built from them.
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The Screens After the Login Page
Monokit is on sale: a Next.js and shadcn/ui kit of the app screens most kits leave out, in the same theme as this site.
Product
Monokit
A Next.js UI kit of app screens (kanban, inbox, calendar, checkout) in the monospace.studio theme.
Article
Automation Solves Output. It Doesn't Solve Outcomes.
I drew two charts to separate two claims that get flattened into one: more automation always means more output, but outcomes peak and then fall. Then I watched my own audit agent sit on the wrong side of the second chart for fifteen mornings straight.
The Audit Agent Doesn't Get Bored
Engineering
The Audit Agent Doesn't Get Bored
I built an agent whose only job is to catch when my autonomous pipeline breaks. It worked perfectly for two weeks straight. The thing it caught was me.
The Skills That Only Worked On One Machine
Engineering
The Skills That Only Worked On One Machine
I opened Claude Code on my phone mid-task and /pickup didn't exist. The cause was a submodule nobody had initialized, and the fix taught me why --recursive is the wrong default.
