A Portfolio of Shaun Scholtz
I design teams, systems and experiences.
In that order.
Hello
Be more strategic! No, be more hands-on! Be the player-coach!
This debate bores me, because I’ve been doing the whole ‘player-coach’ type leadership for nearly 20 years, and I have yet to find the trade-off anyone keeps warning me about.
Scott Galloway has a theory that there are two types of effective leaders: the inspiring leader who paints the vision, and the player-coach who sits next to you and raises your game. His punchline is that the inspiring leader works short-term but rarely long-term. It's a clean framework. I just don't think you actually have to pick one. I've been doing both for nearly 20 years and I have yet to find the trade-off anyone keeps warning me about.
I’ve built teams, systems, and even though I may not be ‘in the weeds’ with the work, I’m still doing design jams, building flows, and mentoring designers where it matters most for them. Whether across social platforms, healthcare, and B2B SaaS, I’ve been through every flavour of organizational dysfunction you can imagine. Right now I lead product design at Assent, we help global companies manage compliance and sustainability. (Turns out, a lot of people don’t know what this is. And that’s OK. It just means I have a story to tell)
I grew up in South Africa. I live in Ottawa now. I am relentlessly curious about people, ideas, technology and food, which is what makes me good at this job and what makes every trip to a bookstore a financial liability.
Featured Leadership Work
Most design leaders talk about systems, research, and vision. These three projects are where I actually built them.
Before Meridian, Assent's product experience was a patchwork of undocumented decisions and components no one agreed on. Teams were spending design cycles rebuilding foundational UI instead of solving user problems. I led the creation of Assent's first design system from scratch: governance, component lifecycle, a reuse-first culture, and a Design Guild that turned designer-engineer collaboration from an aspiration into a standing practice. Today, Meridian continues to mature, as it is now the foundation every product surface gets built on.
When I joined Assent, product decisions ran on instinct and seniority. I built the research infrastructure from the ground up: a 1,000+ participant pool, a tooling ecosystem spanning Dovetail, Lyssna, and Pendo, a structured four-stage research process, and weekly insight operations rituals that kept learning continuous rather than episodic. The practice changed how the organization makes decisions, not just how design does. That work fed directly into the product quality that helped Assent earn recognition from Verdantix as a leader in supply chain sustainability software in their 2024 Green Quadrant report.
Without a shared vision, product teams build in silos. That's what was happening at Assent. My answer was the Concept Car: a design-led, multi-format artifact that showed every stakeholder what the Assent 2.0 experience could actually feel like, not as a spec, but as something you could walk through and respond to. It lived as a presentation, a website, journey maps, and a full-organization booth experience. It aligned leadership, inspired the product org, contributed directly to a major enterprise deal.
Previous Project Work
Below is a collection of previous projects from key startups that shaped my design career.
Zenxmed — Elevating Medical Decision-Making
Physician-led innovation meets user-centered design — a point-of-care decision support tool built for how doctors actually work.
Wellin5 — Revitalizing Online Therapy
Streamlining the therapy booking and client communication experience through a targeted, user-centric redesign.
Curatio — Merging Empathy, Technology, and Health
How empathetic design and user-focused research reshaped the health platform experience for people living with chronic conditions.
The Ramblings of a Mad Man
