I'm Myles, a Product Designer at Xelix. I've been here around eight months, after working at various other fintechs and SaaS companies before. I've seen a lot of different environments, and I can say Xelix is up there as one of the best I've worked at, for a lot of reasons. But before I get to those, I want to explain what my design career is centred around, because that's really the answer to why I'm here.

My design principles

I love products that just work. The feeling when you get into a car and it's already on by the time you've settled into the seat, no keys, no fuss, it just knows you're there. One of my favourite principles is "Don't make me think". It gets quoted a lot but applied far less often. The idea is that you build the product around the job to be done and cut away everything else.

How that applies to Xelix

In our space, finance teams are used to working around their tools rather than with them. The legacy players run old systems built on old patterns, and that leaves AP users stuck with software that gets in their way. Over time they stop expecting anything better, and working around the software quietly becomes part of the job.

It reminds me of banking before Monzo and Starling. For years people put up with clunky apps and branch queues because that was simply how banks worked. Then a couple of products turned up that just worked, and almost overnight the bar moved. People stopped tolerating the old way.

That jump is why I'm at Xelix. I want to help AP teams expect more from their software, the way banking customers eventually did. "Don't make me think" is how I get there: focused experiences that let people do the job in front of them without fighting the tool. No more working around problems. Fixing them at the source.

The new world of AI

Part of what makes that possible is the people I get to work with, especially our AI Engineering team. The collaboration between Design and AI Engineering is a cornerstone of the work. It's how we build experiences that take manual effort off AP teams rather than piling more on.

Having that partnership means design decisions and AI capability shape each other from the start, rather than one being bolted onto the other after the fact.

Xelix's culture

The last piece, and maybe the most important, is the culture. I do my best work when I can take a problem and run with it, when I'm trusted to lead alongside product and engineering, and when there's room to figure things out as I go. Xelix encourages exactly that. It pushes you to move quicker and lead better.

It's a bit of a cliché, but the people really do make the place. There's a lot of talent here and everyone works hard, but we laugh with each other too, and that makes it somewhere I actually want to be.

And that, in the end, is why I'm here. It's a chance to raise the bar for a group of people who've been putting up with less for far too long. That's the work I want to be doing.