About

Stu Grant is a highly skilled Front End Developer and passionate Engineering Manager with over 12 years of relevant experience. He has a keen eye for UX and a love of design, and he believes in three things: the customer, the product, and those who make it. Currently, he is working as a Senior Engineering Manager: Design System at FreeAgent CRM, where he is responsible for the FreeAgent web application user interface. Stu has a knack for condensing complex discussions and problems into simple and communicable concepts and actions. He speaks design, development, and business language and loves to create scalable, device agnostic, and inclusive products. He has implemented a standardized modern UI component system and a complementary UI style guide, driving adoption of the system across the product teams and looking to continuously improve it. He has also championed fully responsive UI development in favor of "mobile optimized" views along with accessibility standards in code. Stu has led and shipped a full application restyle, working with all facets of the business ranging from executives, sales, product teams, comms, to support. He has outlined and run a series of initiatives to remove and clean up legacy application UI and managed large scale changes of the application UI which had grown a stigma of "too big to change." He has improved overall UI resilience by overseeing a project that introduced Visual Regression testing into the application. Stu has worked with Product Designers and Project Managers to bridge the gap between design, development, and the business to ensure the product vision is as good as it can be while maintaining technical standards and improving the user experience. He is managing and mentoring a team of 4 engineers, delegating tasks and using the team expertise to help prioritize and deliver key aspects of the UI. With a strong focus on each team member's professional growth and development, he runs PDP workshops and 1 to 1 mentoring. Stu has a HND Graphic Design & New Media with Merit from James Watt College. His tech stack includes Senior Software Engineer, UI, Frontend, Test, Mobile, and Web.