After five years on the marketing side I wanted something different. I'd always cared more about what sat behind the screen than just the visuals, and I'd helped out one of team in our branch, the web team here and there when they were short a designer, so I already knew the work and wasn't thrown by the coding side of it. I knew the team too, and the senior ux designer, and we got on. So when the senior was leaving and they wanted to fill the role internally, I put my hand up and moved across.

The main job was the pages under vodafone.com/business. A product manager would have a new product that needed a page, or an existing product would get a new feature and its page needed updating to match. They owned the product and the content and decided when a page needed doing. The copy came to me as a Word document, and I built the page around it, which components it was made from, what order the sections went in, how the images sat, how the whole thing came together. A lot of the older pages just sat there untouched unless someone had a reason to flag one, so it wasn't a maintain-everything job, more that I was the person who could take any business page and sort it out.

I designed the pages in Adobe XD, working from our business-site design system. That was a library of the usual things a marketing site needs, buttons, cards, image and video blocks, benefit and stat sections. It was never as deep as a real product design system. No data tables or heavy components, and XD at the time couldn't do the token setup that's normal now. Once a design was done I handed it to an engineering team, who built the page from it by matching each component to its existing code snippet, name, position, size. They didn't write anything new. If I needed a component changed in code, or a new one built, that went to a different team who handled that. So the design was mine, and two separate engineering teams did the assembling and the building.

When the senior left, the design system became mine too, on the design side at least. I was the only one looking after it and adding to it when something new came up. The brand set the hard limits, the colours are fixed the way they always are at a company that size, Vodafone red is Vodafone red, and a lot of the page patterns were already tested and settled, like which sections belong near the top. What I had room in was how a page got put together from the parts. I was also the only creative on the team, everyone else was product plus the PO, so I was the only design voice in the room.
I knew the brand inside out by then, the colours, imagery, icons, spacing, so I often ended up being the one guiding stakeholders and partners on the web side, keeping what went onto the business site inside the brand.