Eric Auld
The gallery is a record of my time with AI image tools. This guide is a record of my time leading design teams.
I’m a Senior Design Manager at Atlassian, where my team designs how tens of millions of people find their way around Jira and Confluence. Next, I’m looking for a Director or VP role leading design.
auld.eric@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub
- Now
- Senior Design Manager at Atlassian, leading design for platform navigation
- Experience
- 20 years designing digital products, the last 10 leading design teams
- Based
- Adelaide, South Australia. Remote for over a decade
- Looking for
- A Director or VP of Design role where strong teams, product quality and practical AI all matter
01About
My work lives in the unsexy layer: the decisions nobody fights over because they don’t feel like features.
I’ve designed digital products for 20 years and led design teams for the last ten. I was founding Creative Director at Bilue, then Head of Product Design at Sendle as it grew from 25 to 200+ people. Now I work on platform navigation at Atlassian, from Adelaide, remote for over a decade.
The questions I like: what happens when someone doesn’t know where they are? How does a team move fast without dropping its standards?
02Selected work
-
A navigation redesign reaching tens of millions
We had a year of navigation work planned. The business needed it in three months. We shipped it on time to tens of millions of people, and the quality held.
Read the case study -
Leading a team through reorg and layoff
Three reorgs in five months, then a company-wide layoff. My team came out stable, a promotion still went through, and being honest about what we could no longer do earned us a seat at the design-leadership table.
Read the case study -
Leading design through AI
After the reorgs, my team looked idle on paper. I used AI to produce a month of strategy work in a week, then used it to win us a real mandate.
Read the case study -
Developing designers under pressure
One designer was in crisis. I held them to a fair standard without losing them. Another went on parental leave mid-promotion, which usually kills a case. I got it through at the most senior tier.
Case study in progress. Ask me about it.
-
Influence without authority
Turned a small in-team inconsistency into a design-standards decision that reached the head of the central design-systems org, three escalation hops away, without ever sitting in the downstream meetings.
Case study in progress. Ask me about it.
03How I work
-
Surface the hard thing early
Bad news doesn’t improve with age. I’d rather have the awkward conversation in week one than the impossible one in week twelve.
-
Stay close to the work
I don’t push pixels. But when something isn’t working, I’ll get in and help fix it without taking the work off the person who owns it.
-
Balance speed with learning
A team that’s shipping is a team that gets to learn. I’d rather make a fast, reversible decision than wait for the perfect one.
-
Collaborate in the open
I’d rather sort things out live, on a call or a shared canvas, than over a long thread.
04Outside the work
Off the clock I’m on a mountain bike, on a climbing wall, or vibe-coding something odd. I like doing things worth telling stories about.
-
PT Call Training App
A flight simulator for sales calls: AI voice personas, real users, 94 passing tests.
-
Fungus Among Us
A pixel-art platformer I’m building with my son. Game design meets parenting.
05How this site was made
I designed and built this site with AI as a collaborator, the same way I lead my team through AI: the machine drafts, a person decides.
- The portraits
Made in ChatGPT between March 2025 and July 2026, across two generations of its image model. Most were made for my team in Slack before they were ever a gallery.
- The words
Placards and wall text drafted with Claude from my notes. This guide is in my own words.
- The voice
The audio guide is OpenAI text-to-speech, directed to sound like a serious museum narrator.
- The building
Wall and floor textures generated with OpenAI’s image model and made seamless with a script. The site itself is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, written with Claude Code.
It’s the rule from my day job: direct AI like a direct report, evaluate like a senior. More on that in the case study.
06Contact
Hiring a design leader?
I’m looking for a Director or VP of Design role where strong teams, product quality and practical AI all matter. Email is the quickest way to reach me.
I’m in Adelaide, on UTC+9:30 (UTC+10:30 from October to April). My mornings overlap with the US West Coast’s afternoon, and my evenings with the UK’s morning.