How I lead
Across three companies I have hired, coached, and led designers through growth, acquisition, international distribution, and reductions. The products are elsewhere on this site. This page is about the teams.
8 product designers
Plus the company's first UX researcher, whom I hired. Each designer embedded on a different product team rather than pooled in a services model.
12+ designers, seven locations
Utah, Boston, Montreal, Quebec, Brazil, Hungary, and California — plus designers from other teams during consolidation. Four products spanning web, mobile, admin, call-center, and conference-room experiences.
5 designers & frontend engineers
A hybrid team building custom experiences for enterprise clients. I was the strongest frontend developer on the team at the time, which shaped how I have led engineers since.
From people I led
Verbatim excerpts from longer LinkedIn recommendations
“Britton has a rare ability to lead through ambiguity with both clarity and empathy. … As a mentor, Britton invested deeply in my growth. …”
“He's an exceptionally well spoken, emotionally intelligent design leader who's in tune with his team needs and helps remove roadblocks so we can do our best contributions. …”
“You can tell that he genuinely enjoys helping others improve their skillset and be successful. …”
I hired most of my own team at LogMeIn, and every designer at BEN. The process is where a team’s values are actually set.
Spec work filters for who can afford to do it, not who is good. I evaluate real past work and think through problems together in the room instead. Candidates called it “the best hiring process they have ever experienced.”
At BEN that meant hiring the company’s first UX researcher instead of another designer. We all did research, myself included — but a dedicated researcher meant we could go deeper, and take on the studies that were hard to justify against everyone’s shipping time.
At BEN I ran hiring from writing the role through the final offer. At LogMeIn I sat on the org-wide hiring council and the broader design promotion committee — which is how you learn what “senior” actually means in a company, instead of drifting into a private standard.
A strong candidate was pregnant, and our parental leave policy was not competitive. We were at risk of losing her, and the gap would keep making us less competitive with candidates for whom parental leave mattered.
I took it to the CEO and HR and argued the case. The policy changed company-wide.
230+ UX professionals mentored through the DevMountain program, plus every designer I have managed. The measure of it is where they went next.
230+
mentored through Utah’s first UX bootcamp — now at Adobe, Amazon, Qualtrics, Square, and dozens of startups
Britton is a great teacher, mentor, and friend. He cares for the success of those he leads… He asks for criticism, keeps an open mind, and leads with confidence.
Cory McArthur — UX Engineer, Sworkit
I hired Tyler McGinnis at Qualtrics and taught him CSS and design. He went on to become a well-known frontend educator — and I learned as much from him as he did from me.
Org-level leadership is the work that makes a design organization better whether or not you are in the room.
At BEN I owned the whole process — writing the role, sourcing, interviewing, and closing. At LogMeIn I sat on the org-wide hiring council, interviewing designers for teams other than my own.
Sat on the promotion evaluation committee for the broader design organization at LogMeIn — reviewing cases and advocating for designers who did not report to me.
Founding member with Meg and Wendy — a cross-team guild that made accessibility a shared, ongoing practice instead of one team’s job.
Part of the design system review team, and pushed for a dedicated systems team. Some of my designers went on to build it.