Awaiting Approval. Season 2, Episode 7 : Angela Arnold - Grace

Angela Arnold has built her career by listening deeply. To herself, to others, and to the quiet signals that tell you when something feels right… or when it doesn’t.

As Head of Product Design at Genomics England, her work sits at the intersection of craft, care, and impact, shaping experiences that matter in some of the most sensitive and complex human contexts.

In this episode, Angela joins Adam for a thoughtful, warm, and deeply reflective conversation about creative leadership, instinct, and trust. She shares how curiosity and gut feeling have guided her decisions, from navigating uncertainty in design work to knowing when it’s time to pause, reframe, or take a leap into something new.

Angela talks openly about losing confidence early in her career, finding her way back through learning-by-doing, and becoming a self-taught product designer through making, coding, and hands-on experimentation. She reflects on the mentors who believed in her, the environments that shaped her, and how working across agencies, finance, and not-for-profits eventually led her toward healthcare, where her work could have a more profound human impact.

This is a conversation about grace under pressure. About patience, self-care, and staying true to yourself in an industry that constantly shifts. Angela’s clarity is calm and powerful. Her leadership is rooted in empathy. And her belief in thoughtful, human-centred design comes through in every story she shares.

In this episode, we cover:

* Trusting instinct and knowing when something doesn’t work

* Losing confidence early on and rebuilding it through making and learning

* Becoming a self-taught product designer through code, prototypes, and practice

* The importance of asking “who is this really for?” in design critiques and leadership

* Why alignment on outcomes matters more than perfect solutions

* Understanding your strongest creative rhythms and working with them, not against them

* Learning when to pause, reframe, or let go of an idea that isn’t serving you

* Moving across industries and what each environment teaches you

* Why healthcare design became a calling, not just a career move

* Designing the spaces between decisions, where real change actually happens

* Self-care, simplicity, and creating a joyful life outside of work

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This is Awaiting Approval. A podcast about the messy, human side of creative leadership.

Hosted by Adam Jennings - a creative leader with three decades of experience leading teams and projects for global brands including Microsoft, Salesforce, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Ancestry, Dolby, BBC and many more - this show features honest, unscripted conversations with the leaders shaping design, storytelling, and innovation today.

These are the conversations you don’t hear in keynotes. The ones about imposter syndrome, trust, failure, confidence, and finding your voice as a leader.

Whether you’re just stepping into creative leadership or you’ve been at it for years, Awaiting Approval is your place to feel seen, challenged, and encouraged.

Awaiting Approval is a Cordial Fox production.Hosted by Adam Jennings.Produced by Adam Jennings & Jasmin Egner.© Cordial Fox Limited, 2025.

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