My Experience

Craft & Design Acumen

Facilitating a shared standard of excellence using modeling & culture

It's always been my practice to build a safety culture within my teams, one where active modeling and constructive feedback keep craft and quality at a high standard. To foster direct, honest feedback, I made sure my teams trusted each other enough to make mistakes together, treating growth as a shared, ongoing process rather than individual performance under a microscope.

Craft as a shared standard

At Ozmo, I held regular standing meetings and facilitated opportunities for the team to share and evaluate work, not just for my own visibility into it, but so the entire team held a more complete, systemic picture of the whole Product family. Design Crits became one of our most consistent ways of building design acumen together, a standing opportunity to learn from each other the way you would in a classroom.

I also made sure ownership of craft was shared across the team. Every designer was required to contribute to our shared Design System, keeping its evolution a collective responsibility. I encouraged my team to establish a Design Guild themselves, then protected time on the schedule for it and showed up as an active participant, and made a habit of sharing our wins in highly visible opportunities like Town Halls so Design's acumen was seen and credible in thought-leadership contexts across the company.

Here's an example of how I kept craft a shared standard as I shaped the Design Org from scratch:

💼 Case:

At Ozmo, I joined with the responsibility of building a Design Org from the ground up. This Design practice needed to take shape as Product was also taking shape in an organization that had been mostly Engineering and Content Development focused previously.

⚠️ The problem:

Without a true Design team or organization, Design functions and governance were either non-existent or underwhelming. As I joined and began building a Design function and a team, I needed to convince the company and peers of the value Design could bring. The consistency and quality of our output and ideas had to be a core tenant of how I could win over the company and create true Design appreciation.

🛠️ Process:

At Ozmo, I held regular standing meetings and facilitated opportunities to share and evaluate work to set expectations across a culture of continuous improvement. Design Crits were one regular means of how I influenced design acumen across my teams as a strong opportunity to learn from each other - just like a classroom.

Foundationally, I ensured designers I worked with were always basing their output and thinking in some form of insights or expertise-backed rationale. By guiding my team through questions like - “Tell me about why you chose this direction or are suggesting this change” I led them into practicing reason-based thinking and storytelling.

One approach I take at shaping a team's craft and acumen is ensuring everyone is included. I don’t only mean in brainstorming and reviewing, but also shared ownership of what and who our team is. Everyone contributed to shaping and redefining what our processes and methodologies were. All design team members were required to contribute to the Design System as well - ensuring evolution is maintained as a collective.

As an experienced Design Leader, I know how critical it is for design and designers to be visible within an organization. As an element of Design Advocacy and Evangelization, I encouraged my team to look for and take opportunities to share their insightful pov, ideas, process and resulting wins. With my support, my team created a Design Guild, led a highly-inclusive Research practice, hosted Design-related internal learning sessions and routinely shared work and successful results in company wide settings like Demos and Town Halls.

✅ Results:

Ultimately I grew my team to three, highly effective designers - mentoring them from beginning early in their careers to contributing as Senior ICs. My team became seen and known positively for their results and skills, contributing as thought leaders and partners to their Engineering and Product cohorts. They each operated both autonomously, leading facets of our Product offering and came together collaboratively as a team - sharing the Design System, our processes and supporting how we were collectively seen and utilized across the company.

More recently at Ozmo, I leveraged a lot of these craft-shaping approaches to steward my team through adapting to and adopting AI.

View a detailed look at the AI Team Evolution work ⇨