Curriculum vitae · updated September 2026

Sage Yonder

Senior Product Designer — design systems & end-to-end service design

Eleven years designing the unglamorous middle of a product: the scheduling screen, the exception state, the handover between two teams who have never met.

Focus
Operations-heavy products
Working hours
CET · overlap to 17:00 UTC
Arrangement
Remote, permanent or 6 month contract
Availability
From February 2027

Profile

What I do, and how

I design the systems behind complicated work — dispatch, claims, inventory, care coordination — where the interface is only the last few centimetres of a much longer process.

My method is unromantic: sit with the people doing the job, map the real path including the workarounds, then reduce the design to the fewest states that can hold it. I write the documentation myself, because a component nobody understands is a component nobody uses correctly.

I work best embedded in a delivery team with a researcher and an engineer I can argue with. Next, I want a service that touches something physical — logistics, energy, or healthcare operations — and a mandate that reaches past the screen.

Selected work

Three projects worth discussing

2024 – 2026

Dispatch console for a regional freight operator

Lead designer · Northbell Logistics

  • Shadowed four dispatch shifts, including a night handover, before drawing anything.
  • Replaced eleven overlapping status labels with a three-state model: promised, at risk, broken.
  • Designed the exception queue first and let the happy path follow from it.

Outcome: dispatchers stopped keeping a parallel spreadsheet, and the night handover became a single screen both shifts could read.

  • Service mapping
  • Dense data UI
  • Shift research

2022 – 2024

Shared design system across five product teams

Design systems lead · Marrow & Pike

  • Audited every live surface, then published only the twenty-six components teams actually shipped.
  • Wrote the contribution process as a one-page agreement rather than a governance board.
  • Paired weekly with front-end engineers so tokens and code stayed one source, not two.

Outcome: new product surfaces started from reviewed patterns, and accessibility fixes shipped once instead of five times.

  • Tokens
  • Documentation
  • Accessibility

2021

Appointment rebooking for a community clinic network

Senior designer · Ovenden Health (contract)

  • Redesigned the rebooking journey around the two reasons people actually cancel.
  • Tested paper prototypes in waiting rooms with patients and reception staff together.
  • Specified the fallback path for people with no smartphone, then made it the default.

Outcome: reception staff could complete a rebooking mid-conversation, and the letter, SMS and web flows finally described the same process.

  • Inclusive design
  • Journey redesign
  • Co-design

Experience

Where I have worked

2024 —
present

Lead Product Designer

Northbell Logistics · remote

  • Own design for the dispatch and yard products, from field research through release notes.
  • Run a fortnightly critique that engineers and two dispatchers attend by standing invitation.
  • Mentor two designers on research practice and writing interface copy.

2021 – 2024

Design Systems Lead

Marrow & Pike · Lisbon, hybrid

  • Built and maintained the shared system serving five product teams and a marketing surface.
  • Introduced annual accessibility audits with remediation tickets attached to owners.
  • Hired and onboarded three designers into the platform group.

2018 – 2021

Senior Product Designer

Kesslow Studio · Rotterdam

  • Delivered service and product design for public-sector and healthcare clients.
  • Facilitated discovery workshops with frontline staff and translated findings into testable flows.

2015 – 2018

Product Designer

Halverton Interactive · Rotterdam

  • Designed inventory and admin tooling for wholesale clients; first exposure to dense data work.
Earlier roles and side practice
  • 2013 – 2015 · Junior Designer, Field & Ordinary — print and identity work; learned typesetting under a very patient art director.
  • 2019 – present · Volunteer — quarterly portfolio reviews for a career-change design programme.
  • Writing — an occasional newsletter on designing exception states, written for practitioners.

Capabilities

What I bring to a team

Practice

  • Service & journey mapping
  • Contextual and field research
  • Information architecture
  • Usability testing
  • Workshop facilitation

Craft

  • Design systems & tokens
  • Dense data interfaces
  • Interface copywriting
  • WCAG 2.2 AA practice
  • Prototyping in HTML & CSS

Collaboration

  • Embedded delivery teams
  • Design-engineering pairing
  • Mentoring & critique
  • Documentation & handover
  • Stakeholder negotiation

Education & certification

Training

2011 – 2013

MA, Information & Interaction Design

Vermeulen Academy of Art & Design

  • Thesis on wayfinding logic in hospital admissions, researched on site over one term.

2023

Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies

Continuing professional development