Rebuilding Thrive’s design team

The challenge

The design function needed rebuilding. Process, progression, research practice, and design system governance had never been formalised. An acquisition had added four designers without the integration work to bring everyone onto shared ways of working. On paper a team of eight. In practice, a function that had outgrown its own structure, with no clear lines of ownership and no shared bar to hold the work against. The talent was there. The structure wasn’t.

The approach

Rebuilt the function from the ground up. Invested in the existing team through direct mentoring and a clear progression framework. Brought in senior hires to add the project ownership and craft leadership the team needed at the next level. Designed an operating model that worked async, remote, and across time zones, where quality lived in the structure rather than in any one person. Made AI baseline capability across the team, not a side project.

• Set out what good looked like at every level and gave designers the structure to grow into it
• Built the senior pipeline, designed the interview process, and ran every interview personally to hold the bar
• Introduced a buddy system pairing staff and junior designers on mentoring and product ownership, making collaboration structural rather than optional
• Documented progression, process, standards, and cross-functional touchpoints so any designer could pick up a problem and move on their own
• Embedded AI into how the team thinks, prototypes, and ships, with designers contributing directly to the codebase

The impact

A team that holds the bar itself, with quality built into how we work rather than enforced from above. Production work compressed by AI, strategic work expanded to fill the space. Design is now part of how decisions get shaped at Thrive, partnered tighter with PMs, engineering, marketing, and operations than ever before. Not an execution layer. The function that sees across the whole org 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.