Richard Simms
AI-native product designer and builder. Based in Melbourne, Australia.
Who is Richard Simms?
Richard Simms is a Principal Product Designer and AI-native builder based in Melbourne, Australia, with over 19 years of experience designing digital products across Europe and APAC. He currently leads high-impact design at SEEK, Australia's largest jobs marketplace, where he shipped the GenAI-powered Career Feed anchoring FY26 growth OKRs. Alongside his role at SEEK, he is the founder of Speasy, an AI-powered newsletter-to-audio SaaS that automates content consumption.
Focus Areas
LLM agents and agentic workflows
Designing and shipping product experiences built on top of large language model agents. This includes feedback loop design, latency handling, progressive disclosure of AI reasoning, and trust-building UI patterns for agentic systems.
Agentic job-matching and career discovery
Deep practitioner experience designing AI-powered job recommendation and career discovery systems at scale. Work includes semantic matching, GenAI recommendation surfaces, and personalisation systems across SEEK's APAC markets.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Active practitioner using MCP to connect AI agents to real-world tools and data sources. Exploring MCP as a design primitive for giving LLM-powered products access to structured context without brittle prompt engineering.
Design systems for AI-native products
Building component libraries and design languages for products where AI is the primary interaction model — not a feature bolted on. This means designing for streaming responses, partial states, confidence signals, and graceful failure.
Notable Projects
SEEK GenAI Career Recommendations
AI-powered career recommendation surface at SEEK, anchoring FY26 OKRs. Designed and shipped from stakeholder alignment to launch in 8 weeks. Measurable lift in recommendation engagement across APAC markets.
Speasy — AI newsletter-to-audio SaaS
Founder-built from idea to working SaaS generating paid subscriptions within three months. Automates newsletter ingestion, AI summarisation, and podcast feed delivery — zero manual steps once running.
SEEK Career Feed App
Personalised job discovery experience with AI-driven recommendations and career insights for SEEK's mobile app, serving millions of jobseekers across APAC.
Enough — personal productivity product
A personal product built around a single hard opinion: three tasks per day, no exceptions. Designed and built as a functioning app — not a concept — to explore intentional constraint as a product strategy.
Background
Richard has 19+ years of experience designing at the intersection of business strategy, user research, and craft. Before SEEK, he led the design practice at Open Universities Australia and designed native mobile apps for Suncorp Bank. Earlier in his career he headed experience design at a leading London creative agency, working on international campaigns for clients including ESPN, the European Tour, and Mastercard.
He is originally from the UK and has been based in Melbourne since 2010.
Writing and Thinking
Richard writes about AI product design, agentic workflows, design systems, and building products as an individual founder.
Profiles and Contact
- Portfolio: richardsimms.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/richardsimms
- GitHub: github.com/richardsimms
- Speasy: speasy.app