I lead design teams and run products of my own.
By day I run design at NewStore. At night I build my own products, end to end, that help people spend more time on what matters.
A real superstar player-coach.Mitun Pandey · Design leadership
You totally nailed the problem.Erik · WhatWeCook
Now almost all of my work lives in ShareMyPage.Levent Simsek · ShareMyPage
I still absolutely love Intura and do use it daily.An early user · Intura
The best design leader I have ever worked with.Scott Matza · Design leadershipWow, the recipes are seriously amazing.Raife · WhatWeCook
So much easier than spinning up a web server.Erik Holm · ShareMyPageI reflect more and prioritize better, which is great.An early user · Intura
He builds design culture, influences how teams think, and helps shape the way we work.Phil Granof · Design leadershipWith 3 kids and a puppy, time vanishes.Peter · WhatWeCook
Anything I build in Claude I can publish and get feedback on in minutes.Sam Bala · ShareMyPageHe has the Midas touch to make everything sharper, clearer and more impactful.Scott Matza · Design leadershipI used the photo import for the pancakes.Dimitri · WhatWeCook
It has become my go-to place for reports, dashboards, analyses, and proposals.Melisande Francisco · ShareMyPage
He does not limit himself to his immediate scope.James Lunan · Design leadership
The app condenses everything textual into slides even Marketing would be jealous of.Dibyojyoti Pal · ShareMyPageHe is a builder, a mentor, and someone who always shows up with a strong sense of purpose.Phil Granof · Design leadershipProducts people use
on an ordinary Tuesday.
NewStore
The till comes off the counter and a sale finishes wherever the conversation is. Nine years designing it, and the back office, website and documentation around it.
ShareMyPage
Share the pages you make with AI, behind real access control.
Intura
A journal for the people who lead, with a coach who has read every entry.
TalkMeThrough
An AI interviewer instead of a form. Send a link, and it asks the questions and follows up on the answers.
WhatWeCook
Meal planning for households, on the web and as a native iOS app.
One thing at a time. Each product gets a run, gets finished, and then the next one starts. You can see the hand-off: red through the winter, teal across the summer, amber taking over in autumn.
- Commits
- 3,800
- Days with work
- 219
- Busiest day
- 102
Smaller things.
Built because something annoyed me.
iPadOS · not published yetiPad as Display
An old iPad in the corner of a desk, turned into a calendar that shows the day and joins the meeting with one tap.
Apple TV · one weekendNuri TV
A television channel with one viewer, my son. Nineties shows on a fixed schedule, and it closes itself at the end of the window.
Web · personalListen Later
Paste any text or a link and it reads it to you. Built for the long answer you would rather hear on a walk.
Making people better is not a strategy.
It is the reason.
I want to help people get better at what they do. I believe the right tool can change what a person is capable of: make them faster, braver, free to focus on the work instead of the friction around it. That’s my mission, plainly stated: build things that help people do their best work and feel good doing it. Leading my design team is the same belief, pointed at the people doing the building.
The people you lead get a manager who noticed the pattern, instead of one who kept repeating it.
Dinner stops being a question somebody has to answer at six o’clock, every evening, for the rest of their life.
Everyone on your team opens what you made from one link, and nobody outside the company can.
Someone on a shop floor can answer the question while the customer is still standing there, instead of disappearing to go and check.
- Research rhythmEvery six weeks, whatever the roadmap does
- Story mappingOne narrative before anyone builds
- Feedback loopsThree horizons, not one
- MetricsOne owner per number, reviewed monthly
- OKRs and growthDiscipline, so creativity survives
- LevellingWhat good means, in writing
A team that works when I am not in the room.
My design operating system.
Years of leading design have taught me that a team scales on what is written down, not on who is in the room. Story mapping, a research rhythm, feedback loops, goals, levelling and metrics, each feeding company priorities, better products and growing people.
How each part worksWhatWeCook,
built from a phone, on parental leave.
A Mac mini at home running agents, a newborn asleep, and an app I had wanted to make for five years. Live Activities, widgets, Siri, and an import pipeline that watches the video when a reel has no recipe written on it.
Read how it was built See the product“It is hard to keep up with his ideas. I was still building the third one when he sent the sixth.”
He isn’t a typical design or UX lead. He can comfortably think like a product person, and is really on the cutting edge of generative AI and codegen, as his team all are too.
Outside NewStore, I build and I coach.
Products of my own, and help with yours.
Questions people ask.
What does Henning build?
I lead design teams at NewStore as Director of Design, where 70,000 store associates use what we make. I also run three products of my own: Intura, a leadership journal for people who lead, with a coach that has read every page; WhatWeCook, meal planning for households on the web and iOS; and ShareMyPage, for sharing pages you make with AI behind real access control.
Can I work with you?
Alongside NewStore, yes. Happy to talk: coaching people building their own products, taking yours apart with you and showing how I solved the part you are stuck on, or just a good conversation. The thirty minutes are free, and not a sales call. Book a time on the calendar at the bottom of the page or write to henning@hwa.design.
How do you build with AI?
I design the product and decide what gets built, and I build it with Claude Code. WhatWeCook was built in 32 days with Claude Code on a Mac mini at home, steered from my phone, on parental leave. The blog post tells the whole story.
Where are you based?
In Berlin, Germany, since 2015. Before that I spent six years in Erfurt, where I studied and in 2011 founded my own studio. I work in English and German, and my own products are built at home, on a Mac mini in my office in Berlin.