Vonny Laing is a user-centred design lead at the Student Loans Company, part of the UK government, where she oversees a service used by millions of people at every stage of their higher education journey. She has held roles spanning UX design, content design, and head of design across both public and private sectors, and completed an MBA specifically to earn the language of business — and with it, a seat at the table where design decisions get made.

We discuss why designing from the majority inward produces invisible failures, how flipping to an underserved-first model creates a halo effect for all users, and why government service assessments make the happy-path approach structurally untenable. Vonny shares how a single day of guerrilla research at a further education college surfaced a critical gap between student loan payments and universal credit eligibility that years of data had never revealed — and why synthetic users can never replicate that. We also get into her "eat your greens" principle for designing across a user's whole life; the case for disaster thinking over happy-path optimism; how stories and verbatims move executives more reliably than dashboards; and why designers who learn to speak business become a secret weapon in any organisation.

Chapters:
(00:53) Welcome and introductions
(01:23) Vonny background
(02:10) Moving fast in the civil service
(04:02) The UK government digital community
(05:05) The pyramid model
(07:03) Underserved versus edge case users
(08:09) Designing at population scale
(09:43) Service assessments and design accountability
(11:01) Discovery research methodology
(13:25) Finding users invisible in the data
(16:22) Bridging gaps you cannot fix
(18:42) Eat your greens: needs versus wants
(20:07) Designing for users over time
(21:04) Worst-case scenario thinking
(22:11) Mining complaint logs and prioritising
(25:47) Why synthetic users fall short
(28:12) Where automated testing has a role
(29:19) Leave the building: guerrilla research
(33:03) Communicating research through storytelling
(36:29) Why Vonnie did an MBA
(39:03) Design's ceiling in organisations
(42:04) Wrap-up

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.