Scope
StepStone Continental Europe was Europe's leading job platform — eighteen million monthly visits, six markets, a thousands-strong organisation. The product surface was wide. Listings, search, applications, employer dashboards, transactional email, mobile, SEO landing pages — and a brand that needed to stay consistent across all of it.
Two threads of my work there became, in retrospect, the ones worth telling.
Notifications — the version that won was the smaller one
The brief was straightforward on paper: lift the interaction rate on the standardised emails StepStone sent its users. Job alerts, application updates, the daily and weekly nudges that bring people back to the platform.
The team tested several variations. Some leaned into added information — context around the job, related listings, supporting calls-to-action — the kind of additions that, on a quick read, feel like they should help.
The variation that won was the smallest one. The sender name was changed in the inbox header so users could recognise where the email came from before opening it. Inside the email itself: the logo, the job that mattered, tighter spacing, less around it.
Performance improved enough that the project became, in Solon's words from the reference letter, "one of the most successful performance uplifts of 2019."
The lesson sat with me. Senior product work isn't always glamorous design. Sometimes it's running the test honestly, watching the simpler version outperform, and being willing to ship what the data prefers — even when it's the version that asked less of itself.
The system across six markets
The other thread was the StepStone design system.
The job: a single source of components, rules and assets that brand, product design, and front-end engineering could all reach for — across six countries, working in parallel, shipping at different cadences, with local variations on copy, currency, and legal structure baked in.
In practice this meant defining the parts that had to be the same everywhere, formalising the rules for the parts that varied per market, and creating a repository the international design community could share knowledge into. Solon's reference letter calls this work "a tool in place which ensures visual consistency, availability of design assets, clear description of rules and best practices, faster delivery times and therefore faster go-to market times for Brand and Product in six countries simultaneously."
I was part of a select team driving that work. It wasn't glamorous either. Design systems at scale are mostly governance and discipline — agreeing what stays shared, what gets local autonomy, what counts as a violation. The win condition is invisible: nothing breaks, releases speed up, the brand reads as one across markets.
Role
Per the reference letter from Solon Magoulakis (then Director Product Design & Creative; now VP Marketing & Brand Experience at Xing):
- Lead UI Designer of the notifications team
- Part of the select team driving the StepStone design system across six markets
- End-to-end visual design across the StepStone product portfolio
- Ambassador of the design team during stakeholder communications
- Sharing knowledge with the StepStone international design community
I worked many projects in parallel, which is honest to say — most weeks held more than one thread.
Reflection
The version that won was the smaller one. The senior move on the notifications team wasn't to fight for more polish — it was to test honestly and respect the answer. Less, tested, shipped describes that case. It also describes most of the work that quietly compounds in mature products.
Design systems are discipline before they are deliverables. Six markets shipping from one source meant most of the work was about agreement, governance, and the rules for variation — not about the components themselves. The components are the visible part; the system is the rest.
Multi-market consistency outlasts the tools that built it. What we built at StepStone has long since been rebuilt on different tooling. The principles — consistency at scale, clear governance, shared vocabulary across teams — are what stayed.
The shape of the work. Lead UI Designer in a cross-functional notifications team — product, engineering, design, analytics — working in agile cadence with continuous discovery as the default. A/B testing in production traffic ran weekly. The design system work was multi-market governance at scale: governance against drift, acceptance criteria for what shared and what varied, a repository the international design community contributed into.
"Mr Cherif's core competence is a 360° degree understanding of the design process and how it clips into the Product Development cycle. He always strives to find the golden balance between delighting the user and at the same time helping the business achieve its goal. Mr Cherif also has a strong iterative mindset: thanks to his performance-driven design mentality, he always aims to understand how his designs perform after release and works hard to adapt them in order to further optimize them."
— Solon Magoulakis, then Director Product Design & Creative, StepStone Continental Europe (now VP Marketing & Brand Experience, Xing)