Awaiting Approval

Maria Nicholas grew up between continents, between cultures, and between disciplines, and has spent her career making that range work for her rather than against her. She came into UX from advertising and brand design, learned to code in a three-month bootcamp where she didn’t see the sun, and built her leadership philosophy around a simple idea: a good designer facilitates great decisions out of...

Martina Hodges-Schell has spent thirty years moving through design, from advertising in Germany at the dawn of the web, through Amazon and Yahoo in their early mobile years, to pioneering UX consultancies and a six-year run helping organisations build genuinely collaborative product teams. She is also an equine coach, working with horses as unfiltered mirrors for how leaders actually show up, bene...

Hey, it’s Adam. This is a short bonus episode because I want to talk to you about something I’m really excited about, and I think you might be too. On July 23rd, Awaiting Approval LIVE is happening again. Live, in person, in three cities at the same time: London, San Francisco and New York City. I’ll be hosting the London room. Amy Khan is hosting San Francisco. Maryam Cristillo is hosting New Yor...

James Ferguson has spent his career moving towards things that excite him rather than away from things that don’t. From a Scottish design agency at sixteen, to building Skyscanner’s design system, to shipping interaction work at Atlassian from the other side of the world, to leading product and creative design at OVO Energy, he has consistently backed his instincts and figured out the rest on arri...

Maryam Cristillo grew up between cultures and continents, studied anthropology and art in the same breath, and has spent her career building creative teams at places like Victoria’s Secret , Naadam , and now Lindt , where she gets to do creative work on chocolate, which she will tell you is exactly as good as it sounds. She also runs a seventeen acre homestead in Maine with her husband, a hundred...

Tamora Petitt has spent 25 years helping people find their way through complex experiences, from redesigning one of the internet’s most visited health tools to building UX teams from scratch, teaching over 200 career changers the craft, and quietly applying design thinking to everything around her, not just the screen in front of her. She started out as a dancer. That turns out to explain a lot. W...

Charles Cadbury has spent 25 years building things at the edge of what’s possible. He created one of the first voice-enabled hotel concierge systems, invented voice-activated audio advertising, won the global Alexa Cup, and has spent the last decade quietly convinced that the way we talk to technology is about to change everything. He also watches the sunset every Thursday, without fail, with some...

Odeya Noble-Bougay returns. If you heard her in Season 2, you already know why. If you didn’t, go back and find it, then come here. Odeya thinks in ranges rather than binaries, leads with a generosity that feels entirely natural rather than performed, and has a way of reframing a question that makes you wonder why you were asking it the other way round in the first place. She was the obvious choic...

Nacho Zuccarino - Vulnerability Nacho Zuccarino has lived several careers in one lifetime. He started out teaching metaphysics in Buenos Aires, moved into advertising, spent a decade in Silicon Valley working at orgs like Google and Netflix, helped launch Starlink with SpaceX, and has spent the last two years building at the intersection of creativity and AI. He is restless, warm, and deeply, disa...

Debbie Millman has spent over 20 years interviewing the world’s most creative people, built one of the most celebrated design podcasts in existence, written a number of highly acclaimed books, co-founded the Masters Program in Branding at the SVA, and helped shape how an entire industry thinks about craft, identity, and what it means to do meaningful work. She is warm, considered, and disarmingly...

David Martin founded Fantasy Interactive before most people knew what interaction design was. He helped shape the visual language of operating systems used by billions, built one of the most influential creative agencies of its era, and worked with some of the biggest names in tech and culture. He’s also a pilot, a go-kart mechanic, a consciousness obsessive, and a dad who quit the nine-to-five to...

Season 3 of Awaiting Approval is here. 22 episodes. 22 conversations. 22 themes. One season. Starting May 7th. Watch the trailer now. E1 — David Martin — Curiosity — 7th May E2 — Debbie Millman — Becoming — 14th May E3 — Nacho Zuccarino — Vulnerability — 21st May E4 — Odeya Noble-Bougay — Continuity — 28th May E5 — Charles Cadbury — Conviction — 4th June E6 — Tamora Petitt — Clarity — 11th June E7...

Season 2 of Awaiting Approval comes to a close with something a little different. No guest this time. No one-word theme attached to a single conversation. Just me, stepping back to look at what this season became. And honestly… I’m still a bit stunned by it. Since launching the show in summer 2025 with no marketing spend, the podcast has grown far beyond anything I expected. More than 10,000 liste...

David Sheldon-Hicks, founder of Territory Studio, closes out Season 2 of Awaiting Approval with a conversation about awareness… and what it really takes to build something that lasts. We start in the garden with a hot drink. After long stretches in dark studios and edit suites, David will take any excuse to get outside. From there we move into the organised chaos of creative life: shelves of unrea...

Lou Maxon returns to Awaiting Approval for part two of our conversation, and this time the theme is care. We meet in a metaphorical Bryant Park with Mountain Dew in hand and quickly move beyond nostalgia into something deeper: what it really means to lead with kindness in an industry obsessed with speed, scale, and minimal viable products. Lou shares the story of the Mr. Rogers figurine that sits...

Dan Onufrishyn is Director of the Creative Leadership Program at Miami Ad School. But before the title, before the CV, before the impressive brand list, there is something simpler running through this conversation: generosity. We start on a nature walk with green tea in a thermos. Mountains, sketchbooks, laptops, stream-of-consciousness doodles. It quickly becomes clear that Dan thinks in systems,...

Lucy Jackson is the Founder and Chief Clarity Officer at Studio Jackson. She’s also a brilliant example of what happens when you back yourself, even when the plan isn’t fully formed yet. We start with a metaphorical drink in an English country pub and quickly get into Lucy’s love of flexibility, autonomy, and working in whatever spot has the best light. From there, she takes us through a career th...

Sandra Gonzalez didn't take the expected route into design leadership. She started in engineering, moved into education, product, and front-end development, then taught herself UX by building her own mobile app startup, intentionally designed to give her hands-on experience as a mobile UX designer and help her break into a UX career. That same conviction runs through everything she shares in this...

Hiring in 2025? Brutal. Struggle. Chaos. Messy. Exciting. In this special bonus roundtable episode, Adam is joined by five leading recruiters and talent partners – Laura Baker, Erica Fortgang, Sam Gale, Meg Rye and Jared Tredly – for an unfiltered state-of-the-market conversation about what’s really happening in design hiring right now. This isn’t a tips-and-tricks episode. It’s a frank, human dis...

By day Odeya Noble-Bougay is Director of Product Design at Aviv Group, but at heart she is a maker. Someone who thinks with her hands, listens deeply, and believes that creativity is as much about care and connection as it is about output. Her journey spans sound engineering, visual communication, early usability work, telecoms at massive scale, property tech, and leading large, pan-European desig...

William Barraclough has built a creative career driven less by formal pathways and more by instinct, curiosity, and a willingness to try things before knowing where they might lead. Now Head of Product Design for International Wealth and Premier Banking at HSBC, his journey spans skateboarding, DJing, restaurant work, early digital agencies, global brands, and leadership roles earned without ever...

Hardy Sidhu is the Founder and CEO of Format-3 , but labels have never sat comfortably with him. Designer, strategist, business builder, father, philosopher… Hardy has moved fluidly through roles and identities since entering the industry as a teenager, driven less by titles and more by a constant need to feel, question, and stay awake to the moment he is in. In this episode, Hardy joins Adam for...

Angela Arnold has built her career by listening deeply. To herself, to others, and to the quiet signals that tell you when something feels right… or when it doesn’t. As Head of Product Design at Genomics England, her work sits at the intersection of craft, care, and impact, shaping experiences that matter in some of the most sensitive and complex human contexts. In this episode, Angela joins Adam...

Joel Gill has lived several creative lives in one. Musician, engineer, global design leader, single father, mentor, and now Chief Experience and AI Officer at Experience Artisan. His story stretches from hiding in a school music room and becoming a session synth player & pianist in 1980s London, to shaping early digital at British Airways, to leading design inside megacorps like Shell, HSBC and S&...

Venessa Bennett has built a career that mirrors the evolution of digital itself. She is now Global Director of UX at Dye & Durham, but her journey began in graphic information design, moved through early digital agencies, transport consultancies, comparison sites, and eventually into design leadership, where she found her true sweet spot. Her story is one of intentional growth, constant reinventio...