← Back to the portfolio
Curriculum vitae

Ben Davies-Romano

AI & Content Design Leader — Principal / Head of Content Design
Summary

I work at the intersection of content design, product strategy, and LLM-powered systems — helping teams turn AI from a shiny prototype into practical, human-centred product experiences.

In practice that means designing prompts, shaping AI behaviours, creating LLM-ready content, testing model outputs, defining guardrails, and building the frameworks teams need to use AI confidently, creatively and responsibly.

My route here has been deliberately cross-functional. Over more than a decade I've worked across content design, product, UX and localisation in Berlin and London — Babbel, NeuroNation, what3words, Klarna and Wise. I started in content design and language, moved into product management to gain more influence over the experience itself, and kept owning the content throughout — often as the only native English speaker on the team. At Klarna I led content design outright, shaping voice, tone, naming, design-system guidance and content practice across a large product organisation.

I write and speak about AI in UX, prompt design, content systems, behavioural economics, and experiment-led product development. Alongside my role at Wise, I mentor UX and product professionals and consult with early-stage teams.

Top skills
Cross-functional leadership UX and content design systems GenAI and LLMs Senior stakeholder management Product experimentation Global UX and internationalisation Team management and mentorship Data-driven product development Context engineering
Experience

Group AI Content Design Lead / Principal IC

Wise — London
Mar 2025 – Present
  • Led content design for Wise Support, building the team and defining content strategy across customer contact flows, automation and AI-assisted experiences.
  • Architected conversational AI agents, led prompt and context engineering, and defined the content quality standards behind them — scaling weekly support cost savings by orders of magnitude.
  • Partnered with Product, Engineering and ML teams to expand conversational AI beyond support into customer-facing product experiences.
  • Built company-wide AI capability through 60+ workshops delivered to hundreds of employees across disciplines.
  • Created a company-wide library of AI agents and automations for design and writing workflows, resulting in 12,000+ downloads across the organisation to date.

Head of Content Design (Senior UX Design Lead)

Klarna — London
Sep 2021 – Feb 2025 · Progression: freelancer to full-time Senior UX Design Lead
  • Led a team of 2–7 content designers, from junior to principal level, across Klarna's shopping, banking, payments, support and AI experiences — a two-sided marketplace serving both consumers and merchants, each with distinct content needs.
  • Owned Klarna's UX content strategy and operating model, prioritising embedded content design support and maintaining a roadmap of initiatives to raise product quality at scale.
  • Represented content design in senior product and UX decision-making, partnering with directors and C-level leaders across Product, Design, Brand and Marketing.
  • Led company-wide GenAI initiatives, including prompt engineering for Klarna's certified internal AI academy and a content model powering a customer assistant servicing 3M+ customers.
  • Led localisation for Klarna's 2024 app redesign, establishing new standards and a central glossary to improve consistency across 7,000+ strings in 12 languages.

Content Design and Product Consultant

Freelance consultancy — London
Jun 2020 – Feb 2025
  • Partnered with 30+ early-stage startups and solo founders as an early content design or product hire, building design systems, style guides and prototypes to support product development and testing.
  • Led product and content strategy as fractional CPO for a San Francisco startup in a Y Combinator programme, validating its MVP and guiding a successful pivot into a new product space.
  • Directed product and content strategy for a New Jersey social work platform over two years, overseeing 40+ campaigns and contributing to sustained growth in engagement and platform adoption.

Product and UX Manager

what3words — London
Nov 2019 – Feb 2021
  • Led product and UX for voice products and third-party integrations, designing, testing and optimising content models and voice-first experiences for Alexa and Google Home.
  • Increased App Store conversion by 35% in the UK and 25%+ in other markets through localisation-led optimisation, leading a cross-functional team focused on global store performance.
  • Designed content across developer and design hubs, web and mobile experiences including onboarding, and developed a transcreation approach that scaled localisation across 40+ languages.

Product Manager and UX Content Designer

NeuroNation — Berlin
Jan 2019 – Oct 2019
  • Led the design, development and launch of a new meditation app for the US and UK, expanding NeuroNation's product portfolio; the app received 700+ reviews in its first month at an average 4.7 stars.
  • Designed dynamic content models to deliver personalised meditation sessions.
  • Increased conversion by 30%+ through weekly product experiments, with successful approaches subsequently presented at Google's Sustainable Engagement Forum.
  • Owned product content across the portfolio, establishing English-language style guidelines and partnering with a German UX writer to localise the product for the German market.

Senior Content Designer and Product Manager

Babbel — Berlin
Aug 2013 – Dec 2018 · Progression: content intern to Senior PM / Content Designer
  • Managed content and instructional designers alongside a cross-functional product team.
  • Led English-language product strategy and the development of new courses and learning programmes used by millions of learners, including Babbel's first advanced-level courses.
  • Developed new growth initiatives including an official online English test with Cambridge English, an integrated B2B learning solution, and live tutoring.
  • Co-founded Stranger Talks, a company-wide diversity and inclusion initiative that received a national award for excellence in HR.
Education

MBA

Quantic School of Business and Technology · Apr 2020 – Jul 2021 · average grade 94%

BA (Hons) Modern Languages

Durham University · Sep 2011 – Jun 2015 · German and Spanish with elementary Arabic · 2:1
Languages

English native. Fluent in German and Spanish. Conversational in Italian. Small talk in Arabic, Norwegian and French.

Get in touch

Want the conversation that goes with the CV?

Always happy to talk about content design, AI systems, or why your product's error messages are letting you down.