Portfolio Briefing - Andrew Sheerin

Andrew Sheerin is a product designer, strategist and behavioural thinker with more than twenty years' experience helping organisations make sense of complex problems, identify what matters and turn understanding into action.

He is strongest in situations where the product, organisational problem or path forward is not yet clear. His work combines research, behavioural science and systems thinking with a strong bias towards making: building prototypes, testing hypotheses and turning emerging understanding into something teams and users can interact with.

His approach is particularly well suited to systems or products where people must make consequential decisions with incomplete or uncertain information.

Professional focus

Andrew frequently begins by asking:

What is the most valuable problem design can solve here?

He rarely assumes the answer is the interface. His work often begins upstream - with assumptions, behaviour, organisational dynamics and the hidden systems shaping a problem.

This involves:

investigating ambiguous or poorly defined product problems
identifying hidden behavioural or systemic structures
creating language and models that make those structures discussable
building shared understanding across product, engineering and leadership
translating emerging technology into coherent human workflows
designing for judgement rather than just information delivery
remaining hands-on through prototyping and execution

Distinctive strengths

Turning understanding into action

Andrew uses research to improve the quality of action rather than postpone it. He is good at recognising when further investigation is becoming less valuable than making something testable.

His practice is experiment-driven and deliberately tangible. Depending on the question, the next useful object might be a working prototype, product architecture, diagram, workshop exercise or disposable tool.

He increasingly builds in code because interactive software often reveals questions that static mock-ups and speculation cannot.

Relevant evidence

Navigating ambiguity

Andrew is comfortable working before either the problem or solution has stabilised. He uses research, modelling and rapid experimentation to distinguish surface symptoms from more consequential underlying problems.

Relevant evidence

Building shared understanding

Andrew treats shared understanding as a design output in its own right. He uses workshops, frameworks, diagrams, prototypes and play-based exercises to help groups see the same problem clearly enough to act together.

Relevant evidence

Naming hidden things

One of Andrew's most characteristic practices is identifying and naming overlooked phenomena so teams can investigate them together.

Relevant evidence

The Productivity Paradox - continuously removing low-effort work until only cognitively demanding work remains.
Visibility Creates Obligation - showing a user an event creates a perceived commitment to assess and potentially act on it.
Support Is Not Support - customers do not primarily buy support interactions; they buy confidence, stability, expertise and growth.
Self-disruptive flows - AI workflows deliberately designed to resist premature certainty and challenge apparent progress.

Read about naming hidden things →

Designing human-AI systems for judgement

Andrew has worked on AI products where the central design challenge was not simply presenting a model's output, but enabling people to understand, assess and act on it.

At Antare, as the first design hire, he helped build the product and design function from the ground up across AI-generated incident feeds, security and operations intelligence, hardware, web and mobile.

His current AI practice distinguishes between acceleration and judgement. He uses AI as a researcher, critic, prototyper and engineering partner while deliberately preserving productive friction where it improves understanding.

Relevant evidence

Selected experience

Antare - Head of Product Design

First design hire. Built the company's design capability while helping shape an AI-powered operational intelligence product across hardware, web and mobile.

Demonstrates: product formation, AI product design, design leadership, systems thinking and hands-on execution.

Rehuman - Behavioural UX Consultant

Replaced surface engagement tactics with a scientifically-grounded behavioural strategy designed to deliver long-term healthy habit formation. Tightened the roadmap and created a framework for assessing MVP features; the company subsequently secured seed funding.

Demonstrates: behavioural product strategy, evidence-based design, independent consultancy and commercial impact.

VMware / RabbitMQ - Staff Product Designer

Designed and delivered a new RabbitMQ SaaS service while improving the broader conditions affecting customer understanding, enablement and commercial conversion.

Demonstrates: complex enterprise design, research, product strategy and designing beyond the interface.

Citrix - Product Design Lead

Led design across Workspace - Citrix's flagship productivity tool - including a new design library and DONA, an AI and machine-learning innovation project exploring how wellbeing could be integrated into productivity.

Demonstrates: behavioural insight, enterprise innovation, organisational systems and reframing established product assumptions.

TerrorBull Games - Co-founder

Created games and experiences including War on Terror: The Boardgame, which became an international cultural phenomenon. The work led to collaborations with organisations including Amnesty, Greenpeace and CAFOD, alongside public speaking, teaching and exhibitions.

Demonstrates: systems design, behavioural communication, entrepreneurship, applied play theory and the ability to make complex ideas experiential.

Career through-line

Andrew's career may appear to span different materials: enterprise platforms, AI-generated feeds, behavioural products, workshops and political board games.

The consistent capability is designing systems that help people see more clearly.

Board games make rules and incentives tangible. Product architectures shape what people notice and how they act. Research frameworks determine what an organisation becomes capable of knowing. Workshops change what groups can think about together.

The materials change; the underlying practice does not.

Read about the origins of this practice →

Suitable roles and environments

Andrew is particularly suited to senior design leadership or senior individual-contributor roles involving:

complex or emerging product areas
human-AI collaboration
trust, judgement and decision support
deep and habitual behaviour change
enterprise or technical systems
early product formation
ambiguous organisational problems
cross-functional alignment
roles that combine strategy, leadership and hands-on design

His particular value lies in discovering what should be designed, making complex systems coherent and enabling teams to act with greater confidence.

Outside of work

Andrew is usually making something: painting, whittling, designing board games or building small digital curiosities. It reflects something fundamental about his professional practice: thinking and making are not separate phases, but different ways of understanding the world.

Contact

Andrew is based in London, UK and is open to conversations about product design leadership, senior design roles, foundation design roles, advisory work, ludic experimentation and speaking engagements.

Contact Andrew · LinkedIn · Download CV