Junior to Lead.
Year
2022 - 2025
Services
Summary
Three years inside Boeing's aviation portfolio - from junior hire to acting UX lead across leasing, crew management, and flight operations. No title, just ownership.
From colleagues
Global Head of Design - Planning and Flight Operations, Boeing
I am pleased to write a recommendation for Mike, who has been working as a UX Designer in my team at Boeing since July 2022. During this time, Mike has not only proven himself to be an exceptionally talented designer but also a valuable team member who enriches every aspect of our work through his approach and personality.
What sets Mike apart is his open and consistently optimistic attitude. He approaches every challenge with a positive mindset, which has a contagious effect on the entire team. This energy creates a pleasant working atmosphere, keeping everyone motivated and focused on achieving our common goals.
Mike has an impressive ability to quickly grasp new information and complex issues. He is able to absorb and integrate these into his work with remarkable speed. This overview helps him not only develop effective UX solutions but also identify problems early on and proactively find solutions.
Another standout quality of Mike is his ability to think beyond boundaries. He has a talent for working interdisciplinary, considering both technical and aesthetic aspects in order to create solutions that are both functional and user-friendly. This mindset ensures that he maintains a clear vision throughout all stages of the design process while keeping the big picture in mind.
Last but not least, Mike is an outstanding team player. He works closely with colleagues from various areas and contributes his expertise as well as his open nature and constructive feedback to every discussion. His respectful and collaborative approach makes teamwork not only efficient but also enjoyable.
I highly recommend Mike and am confident that he will be a valuable asset in any future role.
Senior UX Designer, Boeing
I worked with Mike as part of the UX team at Boeing. He is a multidisciplinary designer, delivering high-quality work and a strong team player, highly motivated and fun to work with. His personal projects in other areas like 3D design or animation are equally remarkable. I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again at any time.
A note on what you won't see
I can't show the designs. NDA is NDA. These are tools used in live aviation operations by airlines including KLM and SAS. What I can show you is how I worked, what I built, and how a junior hire became the person teams called when they didn't know who else to call.
Everything here is process, not product.
How I structure a project
Below is a FigJam canvas that shows the kind of artifact I produce when setting up a project: User flows, research architecture, stakeholder maps. The actual Boeing work can't be shown, but this gives you a sense of the scaffolding I bring to complex problems.
Example project canvas - structure only, not Boeing work.
The junior experience
Boeing hired me as a Junior UX Designer, contracted under Aerdata - a Boeing company building leasing tools for aviation: Asset Management, Record Management, and Engine Maintenance Cost Planning. I had no enterprise background. I had curiosity, drive, and a genuine need to figure it out fast.
The first weeks were orientation: Navigating corporate infrastructure, learning the agile cadence, understanding what aviation leasing actually means. Within a month I was sitting one-on-one with product managers, working through real problems in complex domains.
Customer Advisory Board workshop
Boeing's first Customer Advisory Board (CAB) in years. Covid had kept customers away, promises had piled up, and trust had eroded. The CPO and I had been working on a small workshop comparing old designs against new ones with real users, when the CPO went ill the morning of the event.
I was the most informed person in the room. I was also the newest.
I took the microphone. I restructured the session on the fly to fit the timetable, cut content that would have overrun, and facilitated from the middle of the room. I kept language accessible to customers unfamiliar with internal jargon, ran the breakouts, and closed with an open-mic round that sparked exactly the kind of unfiltered feedback we needed.
Direct user input that reshaped the new feature. Kudos from senior colleagues. And a signal to myself: I could do this.
Promotion and Scrum Master
Within a year, the Maintenance and Assets domains were mine. I was writing and grooming backlog items, working directly with POs, and pulling the same weight as designers who had been there years longer. The promotion to UX Specialist came.
Around the same time, the team's previous UX Lead moved to a new internal initiative. No replacement was hired. We ran a rotating Scrum Master model and when two colleagues left and a third was on medical leave, I became the permanent one.
Daily standups weren't working. They had become social coffee calls. I replaced them with async daily check-ins and three syncs per week: Structured, purposeful, faster. I ran every refinement session, managed backlog connections to dev teams, and represented the team in PO meetings.
Every PI, I presented UX plans to all product teams and handled the final handover window: The high-pressure week where POs could make last-minute requests before the cycle locked.
A stronger design-to-product connection followed. PMs and POs started reaching out earlier, which gave designers more room to work proactively rather than reactively.
Design system ownership
The design system was fragmenting. Mockups no longer matched live components. Accessibility standards were being missed. The original creator had moved on and left behind something that was never meant to be maintained.
I stepped in.
A weekly sync with the original creator to document every design decision: Good, bad, and undocumented. A review gate where nothing new got implemented without my sign-off. A feedback loop from the design team into the backlog. A release cadence with updates shared at design standups. Alignment sessions with POs and PMs to protect existing implementations.
Accessibility became the standard, not the exception. Consistency returned across components. The conversation between designers and developers, which had basically died, started again.
Contextual inquiry - KLM and roadmap workshop
A portfolio-wide shift brought almost all resources toward the Record Management System. Before decisions locked, we visited KLM. UX designers in the room with real users, something that almost never happened. Historically, UX wasn't trusted with customer access.
I can't share the research findings. What I can say: The on-site observations changed the conversation.
Together with a colleague, I co-led the internal roadmap workshop, a session with the CEO, PMs, POs, designers, and our Agile Coach. We weren't the most senior people in the room. We were the ones who had just talked to users.
The result: A sharper roadmap. Features planned on assumption alone were deprioritised. User stories with real validation got the resources. A new team was stood up. Communication lines between stakeholders, previously informal and inconsistent, were formalised.
Handover and portfolio switch
I was being moved to Jeppesen's Crew and Ops Tracking product, one of Boeing's most profitable applications, full remote, collaborating with teams in Gothenburg. That was already a large change.
Then the rest of the Leasing UX team left. Burnout. One by one. I went from transitioning portfolios to being the last designer standing in one while being onboarded to another.
Everything was documented. Confluence pages covering how PBIs were gathered and linked to dev teams, how we planned PI cycles one to two iterations ahead, our meeting structures, dependencies, delivery timelines. All design files transferred: Sketch via OneDrive, InVision prototypes with handover links, Figma projects after migration. Every domain explained. Every past decision justified.
A transition with no loose ends. Developers and POs absorbed the UX responsibilities and kept deliveries on track. Because PBIs were linked to product teams, dependencies stayed visible without me in the room. Leadership called it seamless.
Jeppesen - CDP event and persona work
Jeppesen's Crew and Ops Development Partner (CDP) Event brought airlines, operators, and tooling teams together. My goals: Interview users in the margins of the day, invite them for follow-up sessions, and build the foundation for persona work that Boeing had never done in this context.
Multiple interviews. Extended follow-ups. Detailed session notes shared with hosts and stakeholders. Collaboration with the Lead UX Researcher to synthesise findings into draft personas, grounded in actual operator experience, not internal assumptions.
The first user personas for this product area. A proposal to make them physical, printed and placed around the Gothenburg office to keep real users visible during development. It was also the beginning of understanding that many people building these tools had never actually watched them be used.
Contextual inquiry - SAS
Two days inside Scandinavian Airlines' Operations Control Centre. Shadow the Crew Controllers. Stay out of the way during emergencies. Understand how the tool actually lives inside an operation.
I broadened the scope beyond Crew Controllers immediately. An OCC is a system of roles, each with different touchpoints, terminology, and pressure points. I mapped the room layout, documented who sat where and why, tracked the daily rhythm, and built a picture of the full operation.
New, improved personas based on real operations staff, not managers. A detailed description of SAS's operational structure, regulations, and workstation setups. A visual monitor layout diagram showing which applications were used by which roles. That diagram got particular praise from Boeing lead designers who had struggled to visualise this.
On day four, back in Gothenburg, we presented to developers, PMs, and POs. The session was repeated multiple times: Once for the European design branch, once for US designers building new POCs.
Flight Ops knowledge sharing initiative
Designers across the Flight Ops portfolio had no visibility into each other's work. Different products, different timezones, no shared space. I initiated a recurring knowledge-sharing session, no prep required, just show up.
The first session covered what I was working on. It was well received. People wanted to share their own work. I collected their names and included them in the next invite.
A regular remote cross-country design meetup with participants from the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and Germany. Designers started collaborating, sharing implementations, referencing each other's ideas in PM conversations. Developers got early multi-team insights and avoided duplicate builds.
What made it work, versus similar meetings that had failed before, was that it was built around people, not slots. I coordinated timing personally, moved sessions when key attendees couldn't make it, and made sure everyone felt included.
Alert icons and WCAG remediation
A set of alert icons that had been confusing users for years. Built by developers without a visual design background. Lacking contrast, clarity, and consistency. The PM had always wanted to fix them. There was never a designer available.
I scoped the work with the original developer, pitched the redesign, and built a comparison set: Original icons, upscaled versions, Material alternatives, design-system-aligned versions, colour-coded severity variants, and accessibility-compliant sizes.
WCAG contrast ratios. Heuristics: Recognition Rather Than Recall, Consistency and Standards, Aesthetic and Minimalist Design.
At the CAB, tested with real users while I prepared materials remotely, nobody minded the new look. Everyone preferred the clearer version. The Director of Crew and Network Operations later cited the icon updates as evidence of big leaps forward across the portfolio. One icon set. Measurable signal.
Gantt chart modernisation
A Gantt chart used across multiple Boeing tracking products. Built by engineers years ago. Never touched by UX. Now struggling to accommodate new data types while already being hard to read and harder to navigate.
Partnered with a developer from day one to understand technical constraints before designing anything. Ran a full contrast audit: The chart failed WCAG in multiple default states and interactive elements. Built mockups with clearer visual hierarchy and an accessible colour palette. Set up weekly syncs with PMs and designers from connected products to maintain consistency across the shared component.
A cleaner, more accessible chart that passed contrast guidelines across the board and could now scale to new data types without breaking the layout. Positive customer feedback on readability. An internal standard that teams could finally build on.
What three years at Boeing taught me
I joined as a junior and left as the person who had run workshops, owned design systems, facilitated roadmap decisions, researched users on-site in three countries, and handed over an entire portfolio without losing anything in the transfer.
No single title describes it. Lead, researcher, facilitator, system owner: I moved between them as the situation needed. That's not because I was spread thin. It's because I understood that UX in complex organisations is structural work, not just screen work.
If you work in a regulated, high-stakes environment and you need a designer who can hold the thread across design, research, and delivery, that's the work I've been doing.