Martin Wright

Design leader with deep experience building and leading experience design capability in consultancy and public-sector contexts. I've grown and supported teams through periods of rapid change, overseen design quality and resourcing across multiple concurrent engagements, and partnered closely with delivery and commercial leadership to ship services that work in the real world.

Alongside practice leadership, I remain hands-on where it matters — particularly on complex, high-risk problems involving policy, regulation, data, and multi-stakeholder delivery.

Experience

Double True Ltd · Founder and Design Lead

October 2024 – Present

Independent design practice delivering hands-on product and service design for complex, regulated problem spaces.

  • Lead end-to-end engagements from discovery through early delivery, combining service design, product thinking, and practical execution
  • Hold full commercial responsibility including scoping, pitching, budgeting, and senior stakeholder management
  • Work directly with engineers, researchers, and delivery leads to ship credible, production-oriented outcomes under real-world constraints

Selected work

ecosyste.ms — A platform-wide brand and design system for an open-source sustainability initiative, unifying more than a dozen data-heavy services under a single visual and interaction framework.

TPXimpact · Lead Design Manager

September 2021 – October 2024

Senior design leader within a large public-sector consultancy.

  • Built and sustained a cross-functional design community of practice, creating shared standards, peer support, and continuity beyond individual projects
  • Scaled design leadership capability through significant organisational change, growing the design practice from ~35 to 110 designers post-merger
  • Held responsibility for design resourcing across multiple engagements, balancing utilisation, client demand, and individual development
  • Acted as senior design authority across concurrent programmes, accountable for design quality and outcomes
  • Played a leading role in business development and bids, owning design strategy and pitching design-led approaches to central government and local authorities
  • Embedded product leadership

Central Government Funding Service (MHCLG) — Design lead on a three-year programme bringing a national funding service to Beta. Led service and product design for fund onboarding, defined a long-term product vision in a politically sensitive policy area, and reduced assessor preparation time by 90% and fund onboarding time by 75%.

mySociety · Design Lead

August 2013 – September 2021

  • Led product design for long-running civic technology platforms used by millions, including TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet, and WhatDoTheyKnow
  • Shared responsibility for product direction, prioritisation, and delivery
  • Set standards for usability, accessibility, and content clarity across products handling sensitive civic data
  • Led a full organisational rebrand and rollout across the product suite

Torchbox · Senior Designer

June 2012 – August 2013

  • Delivered large-scale digital products for charities and academic institutions
  • Design lead on the University of Oxford website (Higher Education Website of the Year, 2015 & 2016)

Shropshire Council · Web Team Leader

December 2006 – June 2012

  • Established design as a core discipline when design capability was rare in local government
  • Led design for all public-facing services, managing a multidisciplinary team through organisational consolidation and platform migration

Education

2:1 BSc Computer Science · University of Wales, Aberystwyth

A more detailed, role-specific CV is available on request.