Derry Birkett

Design Leader · Hybrid Barcelona & London, or Global Remote · ● Open to roles

I'm Derry — I go deep on the hard problems and raise the craft bar.

I help product teams ship better — research that shapes roadmaps, design system adoption, and product quality that compounds over time. 18 years across enterprise, scaleup, and 0→1 builds. I go deep on the hard problems and lead through the work. Open to Design Lead, Head of Design, and Director roles.

Hire me into your teamSee my approach

About

18 years. Enterprise, scaleup, agency, 0→1.

I work best where depth matters: untangling information architecture, building research rigour, and setting the quality standards that make the team around me better.

About me →

Years

18

Enterprise, scaleup, startup, agency

Team scale

3 → 9

Design org scale

Range

UK · EU · US

Product, brand, research, AI labs

Now shipping

All Studio →
Curator icon

agent

Curator

A scheduled read-only agent that scans the codebase overnight and files GitHub issues for dead exports, oversized files, and stale placeholders — without ever touching the code.

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tool

Delta

An autonomous system that installs as a git submodule and delivers a daily pull request via GitHub Actions — AI agents pick what to build, write the spec, and ship the code.

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agent

Ledger

A daily audit agent that checks whether the Delta Suite pipeline did what it was supposed to do overnight — silent on success, opens a ledger/gap GitHub issue when something diverged.

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agent

Merge

A GitHub Actions agent that enforces a 24-hour review window and runs an AI safety check before merging or blocking any PR — part of the MakerSuite trilogy alongside Delta and Council.

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agent

Council

A repository of role-based advisor plugins — CTO, CISO, Developer, Product — installable as a git submodule. Each advisor has explicit scope, playbooks, and escalation rules. Part of the MakerSuite pipeline alongside Delta, Merge, and Ledger.

tool

NVSBL

A three-repo suite: an invisible agent engine discovers product opportunities through autonomous scanning, a public API surface packages approved signal, and an authenticated app layer delivers subscriptions, API keys, usage, and billing.

tool

Bloom

A suite of composable repositories — Idea, Stack, Soul, Shulkerbox — that connects discovery, definition, and delivery for AI-assisted product development without losing governance.

prototype

pip

An overgrown but working governance prototype: mission docs, agent roles, workflow patterns, project graphs, and a publishing surface — built before the architecture was fully understood, then decomposed into Bloom.

article

Bloom: The Meta-System for Compounding Product Development

How I stopped accumulating accidental scaffolding across projects and built a meta-system that makes every product inherit the best decisions from every product before it.

article

Building HomeCloud

A private-cloud field note: turning a fragile Mac mini setup into resilient, monitored, self-hosted infrastructure for AI, development, and media workflows.

View all in Studio →

Selected work

All cases →

Designed at scale. Led, hired, and shipped.

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.

Current thinking

The work is shifting again.

I write about design systems, UX maturity, and AI-assisted product work, and keep a studio archive of demos and experiments when the idea needs to be felt rather than explained.