Design Lead

Building a design team (almost) from scratch

Team setup

- Client: software agency with 16+ people, including developers, PMs, QAs, designers and POs.

- Design team: Head of Design (me) and two jr. designers, plus an occasional freelancer designer.

Context

CodeLeap is a small software agency with 16+ teammates. They have multiple clients, usually with development and design demands. It was a common scenario for a designer to work on 3 or 4 projects at the same time. The PM area also started at the same time I joined them.

The CEO and COO reached out to me searching for someone to shape and organize the company's design area, by developing processes, patterns, and guiding the jr. designers into their growth journey.

The challenge

This company never had a design leadership before. After analyzing all areas for an entire week, I identified key points that needed urgent improvement:

- The design team had poor communication with the dev team, so the handoff wasn't as effective as it should be.
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- Design deliveries didn't follow a specific structure, requiring additional effort from the PMs and clients to follow what was done.
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- There weren't clear goals to guide the designers during their learning process, so growth was inconsistent and hard to track.
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- Designers didn't have enough confidence to defend their choices throughout their process.
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- The rest of the team didn't have enough trust that the design area could deliver what was asked in due time.
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- There was a grave breach in communication between the design team and PMs when giving/receiving a briefing.

The mission

My goal was not only to revamp design processes and communication in general, but also to help designers improve their attitude and posture. Besides that, I was responsible for creating a mentoring plan to help them grow consistently and neatly.

Solution and results

*Coming soon*