Inherited a design team with no shared rituals, unclear growth paths, and little visibility across squads. This case study explores how structured leadership systems — 1:1s, critique rituals, a skill matrix, and grounded performance reviews — turned individual contributors into a coherent, self-improving team.
Context & challenge
When I stepped into the Design Lead role, I inherited a group of 9 designers distributed across mobile, web, and smaller-client teams. Individually, the designers were strong. Collectively, they did not function as a coherent team.
There was no recurring management structure. Designers had no regular 1:1s, no shared rituals for critique, and very little visibility into work happening outside their own squad. Feedback was sporadic. Growth conversations were vague and mostly tied to annual reviews. Expectations across junior, mid, and senior roles were not clearly articulated.
This created several structural risks. Designers lacked a clear path for progression, collaboration across squads was rare, which reinforced silos. Promotions felt arbitrary because there was no framework defining readiness, and expectations were not visible for designers to compare themselves against. Over time, this environment would likely lead to stagnation for some designers and attrition for the most ambitious ones.
My mandate was to create cohesion across the design team without disrupting squad autonomy.
Constraints
Several constraints shaped the solution:
The challenge was not simply to introduce processes, but to create systems that would be adopted and sustained by the team.
Approach
Before introducing any structural changes, I began with a short diagnostic phase.
During my first week, I conducted individual discovery interviews with all 9 designers. These were not performance reviews. The goal was to understand how they experienced their role: what motivated them, where they felt blocked, how clear they felt about expectations, and how they perceived collaboration within the team.
Several themes appeared consistently. Designers felt isolated from each other’s work. Growth expectations were unclear. Feedback was infrequent but highly valued when it occurred. Some mid-to-senior designers expressed interest in mentoring but lacked a structure that allowed them to do so.
These conversations provided a clear design brief. The team needed:
I translated these needs into a small set of team systems that could be introduced incrementally.
To ensure these initiatives were intentional and measurable, I documented each of them in shaping documents before implementation. Each document detailed the context, observations, goals, and expected outcomes of the initiative, as well as tasks, ownership, dependencies, and success metrics. This ensured the changes were not introduced informally but treated as structured improvement projects.
For example, the team rituals overhaul initiative explicitly documented the issues observed in existing meetings—such as low learning value, limited feedback opportunities, and poor visibility of work across squads—and defined new formats like design critiques, presentation slots, and design challenges, along with clear success metrics and a rollout timeline.
Similarly, the skill assessment initiative outlined how the existing skill matrix was misaligned with actual capabilities and growth expectations. The document proposed reshaping the matrix into a proficiency-based framework, introducing 360° assessments, and embedding the matrix into development conversations and performance reviews.
To ensure these initiatives were not perceived as side projects, I integrated them directly into the team’s quarterly OKRs. This made improving collaboration, feedback culture, and career development an explicit part of the team’s success criteria rather than optional improvements competing with delivery work.
By combining diagnostic research, documented initiatives, and OKR alignment, the transformation of the team’s operating model became a structured and measurable effort rather than a collection of ad-hoc management decisions.
Decisions
The diagnostic findings pointed to four structural gaps: inconsistent leadership contact, limited cross-team visibility, unclear growth expectations, and subjective performance evaluation. Each was addressed with a lightweight, targeted system — designed to be adopted incrementally and sustainable within existing delivery commitments.
One of the clearest signals from the discovery interviews was the absence of consistent leadership touchpoints.
Several designers mentioned uncertainty about their role, direction, or growth path. Others explicitly described the need for feedback, mentorship, or simply someone available to discuss challenges. In some cases, designers were mentoring others or managing responsibilities informally but lacked guidance or recognition.
This made it clear that the team lacked a reliable space for structured conversations about development, priorities, and wellbeing.
The first decision was therefore to introduce bi-weekly 1:1s with every designer. These meetings were intentionally positioned as the core leadership ritual rather than an optional check-in. The goal was to create a predictable structure where designers could discuss growth, blockers, and broader concerns without the pressure of delivery contexts.
Other options were considered. Feedback could have been embedded into project reviews or handled informally through ad-hoc conversations. However, those formats typically remain focused on delivery and rarely create space for career development or reflection. A bi-weekly cadence provided a balance between consistency and sustainability. Weekly meetings would have been difficult to maintain across nine designers, while monthly meetings would have been too infrequent to support continuous development.
In practice, the 1:1s became the foundation of the team’s support structure. They created a reliable channel for mentorship, clarified expectations, and gave designers a direct way to surface issues early rather than letting them accumulate.
Another strong pattern from the interviews was the lack of visibility across the design organization.
Multiple designers described the team as fragmented across projects or squads, with limited awareness of what others were working on. Some explicitly said they had little idea what other designers were doing or wished there were more opportunities to share work and collaborate.
This fragmentation created two problems. First, it reduced opportunities for learning between designers. Second, it weakened the sense of belonging to a larger design practice.
To address this, I introduced cross-team critique rituals:
Alternative approaches were considered. For example, feedback could have remained primarily within product teams, or reviews could have been conducted asynchronously in design tools. However, these options would not have addressed the broader cultural issue: designers rarely interacting with each other as a craft community.
The critique rituals were therefore designed as practice-level rituals, not project-level ones. Their primary goal was to rebuild cross-team visibility and create a shared space for design discussion.
Career growth emerged as another recurring theme during the interviews.
Some designers were unsure what was expected of them at their current level, while others wanted clearer guidance on how to progress toward senior roles or specialization. In some cases, designers expressed ambition to move into leadership, mentorship, or specialized expertise but lacked a framework that defined what those paths looked like.
Without shared criteria, growth conversations risk becoming subjective. Promotions feel arbitrary, and feedback becomes difficult to translate into concrete development steps.
To address this, I refined and formalized a skill matrix structured around 5 dimensions: UX, UI, Research, Soft Skills and Code. Each dimension included five levels described through observable behaviours:
The decision to focus on behaviours rather than abstract competencies was deliberate. Descriptions such as “strong communication” or “strategic thinking” can be interpreted differently by each person. Behavioural anchors instead describe what designers actually do in practice at each level.
For instance if we take the skill “User-centered design”, the progression in the matrix would read as:
| General skill description | Designs solutions rooted in user needs and evidence gathered from research. |
| Novice | Understands basic UX principles and applies them with guidance. |
| Emerging | Designs with user needs in mind using basic research input. |
| Proficient | Integrates user feedback and research consistently into designs. |
| Advanced | Advocates user needs in trade-off discussions and mentors others on UCD. |
| Expert | Defines frameworks and best practices for user-centered design across teams. |
An alternative approach would have been to rely solely on company-wide career frameworks. However, these frameworks rarely capture the nuances of design practice and often remain too high-level. The skill matrix therefore served multiple purposes: a shared reference for feedback, a tool for self-assessment, and a roadmap for professional growth.
Once the skill framework existed, the final decision was to align performance reviews directly with it.
Prior to this, feedback discussions tended to be narrative and situational. Designers might receive positive or negative feedback on projects, but it was often difficult to connect that feedback to career progression. This ambiguity was problematic for both designers and leadership. Designers could not clearly see what was required for promotion, and managers lacked a structured way to justify those decisions. Another issue was the performance review framework itself: designers were asked to answer a series of questions on the goals they accomplished over the past year, their biggest success, how I assess the current year… These questions can be nice to ask, but the answers reflect vaguely the designers’ feelings - not performance or progression.
By grounding reviews in the skill matrix, feedback became more concrete. Each observation could be tied to a specific behaviour and level within the framework. After going over their readiness score and the delta between two quarters, I discuss with them the ratings where we disagree the most (>2 points of different between self and manager assessment on any given skill items). This discussion is where we can go over their projects, situations they experiences over the last quarters specifically tied to the skills being discussed. Of course, designers prepare the performance review in advance and have access to all the materials that are going to be used during the meeting.
Another possible approach would have been to evaluate designers primarily on project outcomes or delivery metrics. However, those signals capture only a portion of design performance and tend to overlook collaboration, mentoring, and craft development. It also completely erase the differences between two designers operating at the same level. For instance, 2 senior designers might not want to become manager, thus they cannot be evaluated the same way.
Matrix-based reviews created a more balanced evaluation model and ensured that development conversations remained aligned with long-term growth rather than short-term delivery.
Trade-offs
Every structural change involves trade-offs. Three tensions shaped the decisions made throughout this work: preserving squad autonomy, balancing formalization with flexibility, and leading change without direct authority over delivery.
The first trade-off involved introducing team-wide practices while designers remained embedded in independent squads. Too much centralization could have created friction with product teams or made designers feel removed from their project context. At the same time, leaving everything entirely squad-based would have preserved the existing silos inside the design organization.
The compromise was to introduce practice-level rituals rather than project-level governance. Critiques, showcases, and growth frameworks were shared across the design team, but decisions about product work remained within squads. This approach strengthened the design practice without disrupting existing delivery structures.
Creating a skill matrix and structured performance reviews brought clarity to career development, but it also introduced a more formalized framework for evaluating designers.
Some designers prefer highly organic feedback rather than structured evaluation systems. During the interviews, several team members mentioned valuing spontaneous feedback rather than scheduled processes.
The matrix therefore had to balance clarity with flexibility. It was designed as a reference for development rather than a rigid scoring system. Designers could use it to understand expectations and guide discussions, but it was not intended to reduce their work to numerical evaluations.
The trade-off was positioning the matrix and performance review as part of a feedback round on the craft of design and their progression but still encouraging ad-hoc feedback through the team rituals or directly between designers.
A significant constraint was that most designers were embedded in product squads with their own priorities, stakeholders, and delivery pressures. While I was responsible for the design team’s development and practices, I did not control the day-to-day priorities of those squads.
This meant the systems I introduced could not rely on top-down enforcement. Critiques, feedback rituals, and development frameworks had to demonstrate clear value to designers and fit within existing workflows. If they were perceived as additional process overhead, they would simply be ignored in favor of project work.
The trade-off was that progress had to be incremental. Instead of introducing large structural changes to the organization, the focus was on lightweight systems that designers could adopt without disrupting their delivery responsibilities. This was achieved by the shaping documents I was issuing over a period of 2 months.
This approach required more patience and iteration, but it also ensured that the practices became part of the team’s culture rather than temporary management initiatives.
Impact
Within two months, participation in the new team systems reached full adoption.
The most immediate effect was increased visibility across squads. Designers began seeing and discussing work outside their own teams, which naturally encouraged knowledge sharing and collaboration. Cross-team influence started to appear organically, with ideas and patterns spreading between mobile and web teams through critique discussions.
The introduction of structured critique sessions and presentation slots created regular opportunities for feedback and design discussions beyond project boundaries. Designers who previously worked in isolation began contributing perspectives across teams, strengthening the design practice as a whole.
The skill matrix also changed the way growth was discussed. Instead of relying on subjective impressions, designers could see clear expectations for their role and identify both their strengths and development areas. Career conversations became more concrete, grounded in observable skills rather than vague assessments.
Another noticeable effect was the improvement in psychological safety within the team. Regular 1:1s created consistent spaces for discussion, mentorship, and support. Several designers later described these meetings as anchors that provided clarity and stability in their work. Others mentioned that the combination of structured feedback and clear expectations helped reduce uncertainty and build confidence in their contributions.
Over time, the team’s mindset shifted. Early conversations were often focused on understanding expectations and responsibilities. A few months later, designers began proactively asking how they could develop new skills, lead critique sessions, or mentor others.
More broadly, the team now had infrastructure that allowed it to continuously improve its own craft and collaboration.
Learnings / Reflection
This project reinforced a principle I now consider central to design leadership: improving a design team rarely starts with improving design output. It starts with understanding the environment designers operate in and building the systems that allow them to succeed consistently.
The diagnostic interviews revealed that the main barriers facing the team were structural rather than individual. Designers were talented and motivated, but they lacked clear feedback loops, shared practices, and transparent growth frameworks. In other words, the issue was not capability—it was infrastructure.
One key learning was the importance of diagnosis before intervention. The interviews allowed the team’s challenges to emerge directly from designers’ experiences rather than assumptions from leadership. This made the subsequent initiatives easier to adopt because they addressed needs that designers themselves had articulated.
Another insight was the compounding effect of small systems. None of the interventions were complex on their own: recurring 1:1s, critique rituals, a skill matrix, and structured reviews. Their value came from how they reinforced each other. Feedback sessions surfaced improvement areas, the skill framework clarified development paths, and 1:1s provided the space to support that progress.
Finally, the experience reinforced that leadership impact often comes from making invisible work visible. Feedback, collaboration, and professional growth were already happening informally within the team, but inconsistently. By turning them into repeatable systems, they became reliable drivers of improvement rather than occasional moments of progress.
The experience reinforced my belief that design leadership is not only about guiding projects, but about building the conditions in which designers can consistently do their best work.