James Robertson
Principal Product Designer
I'm a principal product designer whose sharpest tool is taste: knowing what great looks like, when it's good enough to ship, and what actually solves the problem. For the last six years I've been the sole designer at Gen H, helping build it from a pre-launch startup into a regulated lender doing over £1bn of lending a year.
I also ship production code. Paired with taste, it means the quality of what lands matches the quality of the design, whether that's a mortgage journey, an internal workflow or a side project built for the fun of it.
- 10+ years of craft
- Tastefully ships to production
- Built Gen H from £0 to >£1bn as sole designer
Gen H
Built a lender from pre-launch startup to over £1bn in annual lending as Employee #15 and sole designer
- Joined
- 2020 (15th employee)
- Role
- Sole designer
- Focus
- Research, product building & strategy
- Industry
- Fintech - secured lending
- Researched and designed the mortgage journey, then built it
- Built the underwriting, servicing & funding tools it runs on
- Shipped tools for partners (Persimmon & Just Mortgages)
- Ship production-ready code as a member of technical staff
Joined Gen H before regulatory approval and helped shape the business through launch, growth and scale. Worked across customer acquisition, broker tooling, internal operations, company storytelling and product strategy. Over time the role grew beyond design: building production software and internal tools alongside core customer experiences, so the quality of what shipped matched the quality of the design.
Side projects are more fun!
Fjord
Four years untangling complex services for Boots, Kingfisher, West Midlands Police and Shell
- Company
- Fjord
- Joined
- 2016
- Type
- Design consulting
- Industry
- Variety
- Tenure
- 4 years
Worked across policing, healthcare, retail and energy, helping large organisations understand customer needs and redesign critical services. Fjord introduced me to research, service design and systems thinking, teaching me how to untangle complex problems before designing solutions.
- Redesigned crime reporting, rolled out across the entire force and cutting unnecessary reports by 23%.
- Built the prescription management service from 0 to 5 million repeat customers.
- Reshaped cancer care journeys, reducing inbound queries by 80%.
- Redesigned the DIY.com experience, increasing sales by 12%.
- Service design for future energy propositions and new customer models.
