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.
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
Reports led
3 → 9
Design org scale
Range
UK · EU
Product, brand, research, AI labs
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 blog archive of demos and experiments when the idea needs to be felt rather than explained.
UpdateThe Palette in the Frame
Monokit 1.4: ⌘K searches the whole kit from any page, and the sign-in links lead to real pages.
Update Placeholders That Do Something
Monokit 1.3: working kanban, inbox and calendar blocks, front end only, and a Team page in the demo app.
UpdateThe Pages Behind the Avatar Menu
Monokit 1.2: eleven more blocks, and Account, Billing and Notifications pages built from them.
Update 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.
ArticleAutomation 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
2026Engineering
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
2026Engineering
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.
The Research Problem I Solved with a Slash Command
2026Engineering
The Research Problem I Solved with a Slash Command
A Claude Code skill that turns URL pasting into three persistent artefacts: a public essay, an internal signal log, and roadmap backlog items.
Stateless and Blind: Two Gaps Every Agent Eventually Hits
2026Engineering
Stateless and Blind: Two Gaps Every Agent Eventually Hits
TinyFish and Hermes Agent represent the two gaps most agent stacks hit: real-time web access and persistent cross-session learning.
