Six years at Kaluza.

Kaluza grew from an OVO spin out into a global energy platform. I grew with it, from Senior UX Designer to Lead Designer on the technical track. This is the arc the case studies on this site sit inside. It gets deeper as it goes.

~3 min read Updated August 2026

6 years
One platform, from startup to scaleup
Senior to Lead
Via Associate Principal, on the technical leadership track
Every major pitch
Lead designer on each major client pitch across the tenure
Now
Shaping the next five years of Customer Care's product strategy

Where it started Taking the plunge.

I joined in September 2020 as a Senior UX Designer. Kaluza, the energy platform OVO runs on, was fresh out of OVO and the agent experience was a couple of forms. Six years later it's a full platform that wins enterprise clients, co-designed with the agents who use it every day. The case studies tell the project stories. This page is about what grew underneath them.

The practice came first.

Before most of the work on this site existed, the research practice did. I started weekly agent observation and feedback sessions in 2021 and ran continuous discovery in its pure form through to 2023, feeding an opportunity solution tree that hangs off the company's goals. The team worked on problems agents actually had rather than problems we imagined.

Then access to agents changed and the practice evolved rather than stopped. The opportunity solution tree became the engine, driving new features and innovation opportunities, with a framework I created for framing them. I've since built a Claude project that takes a half baked idea from anyone, helps define it and gets it into the format the tree needs. Discovery stopped being a thing I do and became a thing anyone can feed.

The photo prompt, the feedback week, the agent sessions that kept the client work honest, all of it ran on this practice.

The chapters.

Six years covered far more than fits on a site. Board videos and vision films, pitch demos, a design system, metrics frameworks, team set ups and the product work running underneath it all. Four pieces are written up as case studies, and these are the beats they hang off.

  1. 2020 to 2021. Joined as a Senior UX Designer on a 12 month fixed term contract and was made permanent in under six months. The agent experience was a couple of forms and the early years were building it out into something agents could live in, embedded in the product teams, and starting the weekly agent sessions in 2021 that grew into the practice above.

  2. 2022 to 2023. The migration years. We'd been working product led and outcome driven, with the discovery practice feeding the roadmap. The SSE migration flipped that overnight to output and requirement driven, a hard deadline and 3.5 million customers to move onto the platform. Among them were two cohorts of around 150,000 whose accounts agents couldn't work at all, and I was embedded across two product teams designing the support that unblocked them. In parallel the commercial work found me. Sales and marketing streams, a board video for a prospective client, the vision films for where the platform could go. I restarted the design system, took on my first direct report and was promoted to Associate Principal Product Designer in 2023.

  3. 2024. The year the discovery practice paid out in product. I led the forming of a new product team, the mission, the ways of working and the discovery workshops, a functioning team from week one with a research driven backlog. Off that tree came a photo prompt at the moment the customer is standing at the meter, Submit a photo, and a dedicated week on why agents couldn't trust the screen, A week on feedback.

  4. 2024. The pitch work stepped up. A week in a client's offices proving the platform could run a retailer it had never run. Proving we could run a retailer we had never run. By now I was acting lead on every major client pitch.

  5. 2025 to 2026. CCaaS, a contact centre platform sold as a concept and built for real, first customers migrating within a year of kick off. Promoted to Lead Designer during it. A contact centre platform, pitch to first customers in under a year.

  6. 2026. The strategy itself. The deepest the work has gone. I now sit at leadership level across Customer Care and the global UX function, working with the Head of Product and the Product Director to shape the next five years of Customer Care product strategy. Market and competitor research. Internal interviews with the CCO, the Head of Pre-sales and the Head of Engineering. Distilled into the vision the products get built against. Alongside it I'm defining the guardrail framework for AI assisted design, the principles, review checkpoints and prompt patterns that keep prototypes built with Claude delivering strong experiences rather than fast ones. I've fed strategy through vision work for years. Now I'm shaping and delivering it.

    The strategy work runs through design itself too. A company restructure left a far smaller design team, and I'm part of defining the UX strategy that follows it. How a smaller team works, and how design gets seen across the company.

What got built around the work.

The projects shipped and moved on. These stayed.

  • The research practice. Weekly sessions since 2021, continuous discovery as the default, and a recruitment process the wider team now runs on.
  • The crit culture. I run the design crits and the fortnightly design community sessions. They started as my push and now run without me, which was the point. A weekly design newsletter keeps the inspiration coming between them.
  • Measurement. A UX metric framework, an analytics naming convention and a Figma plugin that means designs ship instrumented by default.
  • Quality at pace. Developer PR sign off, handover standards, and Figma restructured so a multi client organisation can build the same thing the same way.
  • Templates the team still uses. Session guides, forming and norming formats, the service mapping approach that became a pre sales runbook.

People, and the fork.

I line managed a designer through a genuinely difficult period, for her and for me, and learned more about management in that time than any course would teach. When the route up split into people leadership and technical leadership, I chose technical. I still mentor across the team on visual craft and personal development. The difference is I set the standard through the work now, not through a reporting line.

“Ben's contributions and reliability in taking nebulous requests from pre-sales or leadership and quickly turning them into tangible deliverables has been a hallmark of his contributions and recognition.”

Manager review, Kaluza

The detail.

The full record, titles, dates and the work before Kaluza, is in the CV.