Avira was my first role with full design ownership at organisational level, and my hardest test. Over four years I built the product design organisation, established a cross-brand design system and steered a team of around twelve designers through two mergers: first BullGuard, then Gen™ (NortonLifeLock).
What I owned
I inherited a grown, distributed design landscape with no shared foundation. My brief was both at once, ship in the day-to-day and fix the structure.
- Umbrella Design System, a tokenised, cross-brand system as the single source of truth for every Avira product. Tokens instead of pixels: a new brand look now takes days, not weeks.
- Design organisation, from lone contributors to a team with a shared process, design reviews and growing design maturity.
- UX research, decisions grounded in evidence rather than opinion.
Impact
The design system cut brand-enablement time from roughly two months to one or two weeks; a Norton prototype was ready in four weeks. Through both mergers the team stayed effective and the design language consistent, even as the company reinvented itself twice.
