Leadership
Building the design organization.
Twice I’ve inherited a small design team and built it into a full-service organization — research, content design, and design ops included, not bolted on later.
Scaling the org
Freedom / Achieve
2 → 7
Inherited a senior and a junior product designer. Built the team to seven: five product designers plus a dedicated UX researcher and a UX copywriter.
eHealth
5 → 12
Inherited four designers and a UX copywriter. Built the team to twelve: a UX researcher, two UX content designers, two design managers each leading two product designers, and three additional product designers reporting directly to me. Two of the twelve were contractors.
What I built
Not just headcount — the functions around it
Growing a team is the easy part to point to. The harder, more durable work is building the structure and functions that let a bigger team actually perform:
- The pod model. Rolled out cross-functional pods so design, research, and content sit close to the product and engineering work they support, instead of being staffed ad hoc.
- A dedicated research function. Built a robust cross-functional UX research practice that other teams, not just mine, could draw on.
- A content design function. Established a collaborative content design team aligned with marketing copywriters, and built the content standards, accessibility guidelines, and style guides that kept voice consistent as the org grew.
- A shared design system. Built and maintained a design system in close partnership with engineering, aligned directly to their front-end component and JavaScript libraries.
- A design ops function. Out of necessity, for a smaller team growing under real resource constraints — ops became what made everything else sustainable.
Proof it worked
- Hired a world-class UX researcher who went on to collaborate with and support teams well beyond my own.
- Hired several other top-tier design and content talent who raised the bar for the whole org.
- Planned and led cross-functional hackathons that brought Product, Design, and Engineering together outside the day-to-day roadmap.
- Planned and led annual, multi-day Product/Design/Engineering offsites — investing in the relationships that make cross-functional work fast when it counts.