Building a world class design team

I joined Thrive as an individual contributor, and moved into the Head of Design role seven months later. The CPTO had seen gaps in how the function was operating and wanted stable leadership in place to make serious, structural changes. There was a lot to rebuild, and no runway to rebuild it slowly.

What was there at the point I took over was a team running on goodwill. Four designers of mixed experience and engagement, with no process, no progression framework, no research practice, and a design system being introduced without governance. Leadership had been on a consulting arrangement, which meant nobody was owning the direction of the function. Shortly after I took the role, an acquisition added four more designers to the team, two on agency contracts and one going on maternity leave almost immediately. On paper a team of eight. In practice, a fragmented group with no shared ways of working, no clear ownership, and no authority to push back when asked to build the wrong thing.

The design team wasn’t underperforming. It had never been set up to perform.

The function needed rebuilding from the ground up before anything else could follow (including the shared vision I knew the company would eventually need). I immediately set about reshaping the team, giving it the structure it badly needed and bringing in the senior capability it was missing.

The first job was lifting the existing team. The designers I inherited had been left to operate without process, without progression, and without anyone holding the standard. Most of them were better than the function had given them room to be. I worked directly with each of them on the gaps, set out what good looked like at every level, and gave them the structure they needed to grow into.

The second was filling the holes the existing team couldn’t yet cover. The staff hires weren’t about seniority for its own sake. They were deliberate bets on the capability the function was missing: thinking at a system level, owning projects end to end from research through to delivery, working cross-functionally with PMs and engineering leads, and holding the bar on craft while doing it. That bar was non-negotiable, and the only way to hold it was to be the one setting it. I built the pipeline, designed the interview process, and ran every interview myself.

The third was making sure they all operated as one team. The structural move that held it together was the buddy system. Every staff designer partners with a more junior designer on growth and mentoring. Every designer who owns a product domain partners with the same PMs and engineering leads on the product side of that domain. Skills development, cross-team accountability, and product ownership all sit inside the same pairings rather than as separate threads in a spreadsheet. It forces collaboration by design and means no single person is ever the only one carrying a piece of the work.

By Christmas, with the staff designers onboarded and buddied up, the existing team levelled up, the vision work I’d initiated running at full tilt, and the design system migration in parallel, the team was holding up under the weight of all three.

The team is fully remote, distributed across time zones, and async by default. There’s no shoulder to tap and no whiteboard to gather around. That changes everything about how a team needs to be set up to work. People have to be able to make good decisions on their own, find the answers they need without a meeting, and trust that the rest of the team will do the same when something is in their lane.

My job as the leader of that team isn’t to be the bottleneck people route through. It’s to give them the tools, the training, the documentation, and the clarity to operate without me in the room. Progression is documented. Process is defined and lives where the team can find it. Standards are explicit. Cross-functional touchpoints are written down. None of it exists for its own sake. It exists so that on any given day, any designer on the team can pick up a problem, work out who they need, find what they need, and move.

What that means in practice is the team holds the bar themselves. The structure I built isn’t there to enforce quality, it’s there to make quality the default. Critique, accessibility checks, research methodology, visual direction, the way we partner with marketing on creative work, all of it sits inside ways of working the team owns rather than rules I police. The team runs because it’s been set up to run.

AI is now baseline capability across the team, not a side project. Every designer uses it as part of how they think, prototype, and ship. Half the team are already pushing code to production. The mechanics that used to swallow days are handled in hours, which means the team’s time goes to the parts AI can’t do for them: deciding what’s worth building, understanding why customers actually need it, and making sure the thing that ships is the right thing.

That changes what design is for. When the production work compresses, the strategic work expands to fill the space. The team is closer to customers than they’ve ever been, partnered tighter with PMs and engineering than ever before, and increasingly the function that brings marketing, customer success, and operations into the same conversation. Design isn’t downstream of decisions any more, it’s where the decisions get shaped.

That’s the team I set out to build. Not an execution layer waiting for direction, but the spearhead of the company, the function that sees across the whole org, holds the customer in the room, and points everyone in the same direction. Most companies don’t think of design that way. The ones that will win in the next decade do.