My Experience

Shaping Design Orgs

Growth and Capability Transformation

I’ve defined what Product Design is organizationally and how it innovatively functions at three different companies over the past 10 years.

At Exadel, while reporting directly to the CEO, I oversaw a team of eight multi-disciplined folks including Marketing, Design and Native-Front End. Working in this software consultancy environment, I introduced Product Discovery as a repeatable process where my team would consult with prospective customers and understand their needs through appropriate research activities - which I leveraged to dramatically improve project estimations and shape requirements as living prototypes to improve project resolution.

At Block.one, I found myself joining an exciting Blockchain startup company during a period of hyper-growth. I grew the design team to seven, including a UX Engineer, while interacting daily with the CTO and COO to ensure we were aligned on the right priorities. I led the team into a robust design system that spanned several products, including coded components in Storybook built by Design to ensure efficient facilitation with an expansive Engineering group.

Most recently at Ozmo, I was brought on to build a Design Org from scratch:

💼 Case:

As I joined at the same time as my immediate supervisor, the VP of Product, I was tasked with forming a Design Org and Practice to lead the company forward into a PLG environment.

⚠️ The problem:

The challenge was operating as a founding designer while building a design organization as an executive - forming practices and processes to support scaling Design and our capabilities.

🛠️ Process:

As I recruited, hired and grew a team of three Product Designers, I shaped a research practice that became quickly accepted by the company through active and open inclusion, transparency and turning around insights often. Our processes and team functions within the company continuously evolved - I led the team through adapting to advancing technologies, new industries and changing company strategies.

I did this by being a true servant leader - modeling the attributes I wanted my team to embody and communicating as a bridge between leadership and the team - ensuring we could react with as much current knowledge at any given moment.

✅ Results:

I oriented my small - but mighty team of three across pods, working effectively within Sprints, collaboratively with Engineering counterparts, and as partners to their PM/PO colleagues. From my perspective, it was part of their responsibility to build and foster relationships across disciplines in order to operate strategically sooner in workstreams.

My team handled three enterprise SaaS products and one internal custom-designed CMS, contributed to an AI-enabled Design System, maintained a training and onboarding program for new customers, were included in Sales pipeline demos and discussions, and performed consistent user research - often onsite with our users in their natural work setting.

I established shared experience principles and a research practice that let individual product teams stay innovative while staying connected to a unified platform vision. I founded and led Ozmo's first Customer Advisory Board and regularly led quarterly design-visioning exercises, translating research directly into company strategy and the narratives that carried it to leadership.

More recently, I researched and shaped the Conversational Design Practice. This was an internal framework prescribing how any conversational AI experience at Ozmo should be consistently designed going forward. It spanned topics like active listening and paraphrasing to confirm understanding, building trust through the interaction itself, human-in-the-loop at key journey points, and graceful escalation. The Conversational Support Assistant was designed following these guidelines, driving a 400% increase in answers delivered to self-support users.

Across all of my leadership experiences, many former designers I have mentored and led have now gone on to become managers and directors themselves.

Related Case Studies

• My ExperienceLeveraging user inights

  Leading visioning

  to influence Product strategy

• My ExperienceLeading teams

  AI Adoption

  with Psychological Safety

• My ExperienceStrategically Aligning

  Users to Business Value

  leveraging Discovery