Hi, I'm Owen đź‘‹
I'm a design leader with experience wearing different hats, as a content designer, developer, and people leader.
I've been in the trenches as a developer, content designer and design leader—my speciality is making the technically complex, simple.
Today, I'm a Product Design Manager at Stripe in Victoria, British Columbia. I lead a team of designers building tools developers love, the world's best developer documentation, and developer AI.
TL;DR
What
Before Stripe and Shopify, I ran a freelance UX strategy and consulting business.
It started with Charged in 2013, a weekly newsletter delivered to 15,000 people, and grew into helping others with UX strategy for more than three years.
Where
I live in Victoria, British Columbia, with my partner and our beautiful Duck Tolling Retriever, Kaya.
Before we moved to Canada in 2019, we lived in Amsterdam, The Netherlands for 5 years, but I grew up in Wellington, New Zealand (we invented the flat white).
Weird
When I'm not working, I love to read, bake, and hike. I'm a little obsessed with finding new music, too.
I'm an avid Twitter user, and joined the service in 2008. I didn't get my short username until much later, but that's a story for in person.
Career
Product Design Manager (Stripe)
I lead product design for Stripe’s developer experience, docs, and AI. We push the boundaries of developer tools to help our users focus more on growing their business, rather than building.
UX Manager (Shopify)
I led a large UX team working on developer tools at Shopify, from API design to the CLI, and deep in the weeds of extensibility. Mostly recently, I lead the custom storefronts group working on Hydrogen and Oxygen.
Founder / Freelancer (Charged)
I helped brands with content, UX strategy and more. Working with a group of companies in every stage to help them get the most from their resources, and grow products with great copy.
Digital Director (VanMoof)
Built the digital marketing organization from the ground up to focus on data-driven decision making and moved app + web development in-house.
I led the engineering team, built out a digital marketing + voice strategy, and helped launch the brand into new countries (including Japan) online.
Editor (The Next Web)
Telling stories about the people behind technology, writing news and breaking down complex topics for wide audiences. Managed implementation of performance-focused overhaul of the site, slashing loading times 60 percent.
Infrastructure/Devops Engineer (Xero)
Engineer on critical infrastructure team responsible for scaling the platform to millions of users. Supported product team to debug issues on the platform, optimized performance and built out a deployment pipeline for high availability.
Side projects
Independent technology blog and newsletter, keeping people like you up to date with the latest trends.
Read now >Learn to write through the power of habit-building. It's a social platform that encourages writing anything.
Try it now >A tech podcast with a difference. Three hosts, casual conversations about the state of the industry.
Listen now >Say hello.
I'm currently working full-time for Stripe from Victoria, British Coumbia. Working on something interesting? I'm always open to chat