Product & Design Leader
Gideon Bullock
Twenty-five years building design and product organisations, leading transformation and the innovation pathways that decide what gets funded. Employee seven at Songkick, a forty-person function with its own P&L at Toyota. I design and build, and this year I have shipped AI products end to end. An engine can read a face or a voice accurately and still have no idea what the reading means. That gap is the problem I am building for.
Built design at Toyota from zero to 40+ · £10m annual internal revenue with full P&L · Employee #7 at Songkick, seed stage to the Warner Music Group sale · Shipped an AI voice product this year, now building multimodal emotion middleware
Building and advising at the AI layer, hands-on. Looking now for the next design leadership role.
- A live AI voice coaching product, designed and shipped end to end
- Emotion intelligence middleware, in a live pilot under NDA
- A venture business building several AI products on one shared set of components. Co-authored its operating model, covering how an idea gets picked up, how it is tested cheaply, when it earns investment, and how components get built once and reused. I also built and deployed the empathic AI voice demonstrator for one of its ventures, in health. The premise is that AI-assisted development makes building cheap, so the risk moves upstream to building the wrong thing, and the governance has to move with it.
Seven years at Toyota Connected Europe, building a design organisation from scratch to over 40 people across connected vehicle apps, in-vehicle systems and digital services, with full P&L accountability. Employee #7 at Songkick, from seed through to the Warner Music Group sale. Part of the small design team at Skype during its growth from 11 million to over 200 million users. Six years at the BBC, leading design on the homepage, global navigation, and the project that became iPlayer. Chief Design Officer at a fintech in Egypt, launching mobile payroll for unbanked workers.
Places I've Worked
Work
The design organisation I built at Toyota, from zero to 40+, and the service design capability it was eventually allowed to own. The app that organisation shipped, from 1.9 stars to 4.6, designed by the team. Songkick from seed to the Warner acquisition and Dopay from nothing to launch, both with my own hands on the product. And PrepCall and Emotrix, built alone on Hume's Empathic Voice Interface.
Earlier Work
Employee number seven at Songkick (2008–2016). Led design from seed stage to the Warner Music Group acquisition. Apple Editors' Choice, UK App of the Week, a Webby, Billboard App of the Month, Fast Company's most innovative in music.
Six years at the BBC (1998–2004), where I led design on the bbc.co.uk homepage and global navigation, Radio 1 and Doctor Who's first websites, and the project that became iPlayer. Partnered with RNIB to pioneer screen reader accessibility and worked alongside Neville Brody on BBC Digital branding. UX and usability testing were new disciplines at the time.
Part of a small design team at Skype (2004–2007) during its growth from 11 million to over 200 million users. Designed the onboarding flow and the viral referral loop that helped drive near-zero-cost user acquisition. Built early mobile experiences on Nokia devices before the App Store existed.
Chief Design Officer at Dopay (2017–2018), a zero-to-one fintech launch in Egypt providing mobile payroll for unbanked workers. The product reached 85% adoption within three weeks of launch. Clients included McDonald's Egypt. The work laid the foundation for a subsequent $18 million Series A.
Projects
Things I've built
PrepCall
An AI voice coach for interview practice. You speak with it for twenty minutes and it returns a coaching report grounded in what you said and how you said it. I designed and built it end to end, including the voice interaction model, the report architecture, and the EU AI Act compliance work.
Visit project
Emotrix
Middleware for multimodal emotion intelligence. The engines that read faces and voices are improving fast. A raised brow still means one thing in a usability test and another in heavy traffic, and Emotrix is the interpretation layer that supplies the missing context, engine-agnostic by design.
Early stage, in a live pilot under NDA
n8n community workflow
A workflow that reads the n8n community forum and GitHub issues, runs each post through a fixed seven-bucket taxonomy with a language model, and sends a weekly digest of where new users get stuck. Built in September 2026 as a personal project on n8n Cloud. The first run covered fourteen posts. The first-run flag came back at zero per cent, which says more about the GitHub source than about the users, and it needs investigating before the numbers mean anything.
Verbalised Sampling Skill
A Claude skill that implements Stanford's Verbalised Sampling technique, recovering diverse outputs suppressed by alignment training. Generates five distinct responses from one prompt.
Read the articleExpertise
What I focus on
Craft & Delivery
- Product and service design across app, web, and embedded
- UX research strategy and standards
- Continuous discovery and validation
- Design systems direction
- Accessibility and inclusive design
Organisation & Operations
- Building design teams from scratch
- Operating models and team structure
- Resourcing, utilisation, and financial performance
- Global, distributed teams
Leadership & Influence
- Change leadership and digital transformation
- Embedding design into engineering-led organisations
- Developing design leaders
- Coaching, mentoring, and career development
- Senior stakeholder and executive communication
- Cross-functional alignment
- AI integration into design workflows
Approach
How I think about the job
I've spent most of my career in places where design had to prove it was worth having. Early-stage startups with no design function, large organisations where design was seen as a downstream service, environments where the work was figuring out how to make design matter before you could do the design itself.
I ran the Toyota function on a full P&L, and I have sat in investment discussions, governance boards and strategic planning as the person accountable for design's numbers as well as its quality. Design leaders who can't talk about resourcing, utilisation and margin in concrete terms don't get taken seriously at the level where decisions are made.
The part of the job I care most about is developing people. Setting a clear bar, then giving people the context and autonomy to meet it. Several of the team I built at Toyota have told me it was the best team they'd ever worked in. That matters more to me than most metrics.
About
I studied graphic design in the early nineties, when there was one computer with internet access between forty of us and nobody had a mobile phone. The web arrived while I was learning about typography, print, and communication from Paul Rand and Dieter Rams. I've been working in interactive media ever since, through every wave from CD-ROMs and rave flyers to connected vehicles and AI agents. London has been home throughout.
I'm at a point in my career where the work I find most rewarding is helping other designers grow. Taking chances on people, giving them the room to figure things out, and helping them avoid some of the mistakes I made along the way. Several people I've hired and developed have gone on to lead their own teams, start companies, and do work that's better than anything I could have done alone. That's the part that lasts.
Writing
Thinking out loud
Things I've learned across three decades in design, about teams, organisations, craft, and the wider forces that shape how we live and work.
Get in Touch
I'm looking for a VP, Head of Design or Design Director role in London, where design has to become a real function, and where the AI question is live. Available now.
Email gideonb@me.com, connect on LinkedIn, or download my CV.