Leadership
How I lead a design team.
Principles, rituals and systems I use to turn a group of designers into a function that product and engineering trust.
Three principles
01
Understand the system before changing it.
Discovery comes first. On ValGenesis CPV that meant on-site sessions with quality experts and validation engineers, stakeholder interviews from product to regulatory, and a heuristic evaluation of the legacy workflow. Only then did the redesign start.
02
Make decisions testable.
I frame ideas as hypotheses, run lean experiments and kill the ones that do not hold up, so engineering time goes to things worth building.
03
Build a team that does not need me in the room.
Clear patterns, shared documentation and a high bar the team owns. At ValGenesis, design QA stopped routing through me.
How the team works
Rituals
Weekly design huddles, cross-functional design reviews, critique, and design QA. Regular sessions with developers to align on patterns and feasibility.
Systems
A design system built from zero at Cyferd, with a Figma UI kit and Storybook documentation shared with engineering. A scaling strategy for the ValGenesis design system as the business grew.
Hiring and growth
I led recruitment for UX, UI and UX research roles at ValGenesis, and mentored designers on complex patterns, usability testing and interaction design across several teams.
Partnership
Tighter workflows between UX, engineering and project management, and a feedback loop with Customer Success so design priorities follow the product roadmap.
Research practice
Customer site visits and design workshops across several countries, service blueprints, journey maps and moderated usability testing with domain experts.
DesignOps
A centralised repository of guidelines and components, automated design handoff with Figma plugins, and a shared review process. On the Gateway project this cut development cycles by 25%.
Method
The loop I run with every team.
-
01
Understand
Sit with the experts. Map the system before touching a screen.
-
02
Align
Workshops that turn a complex domain into one shared mental model.
-
03
Decide
Make options testable. Validate or kill ideas before engineering.
-
04
Build
Design system, patterns and a team that carries the standard.
-
05
Measure
Define what good looks like. Test it with the people who use it.
Repeat, with the team in the room