Design Leadership: Building Foundations for Success

Creating the career growth paths, principles, and processes that enable design teams to flourish and deliver their best work.

In 2016, I joined Chartbeat as a Senior Product Designer after leading the Product Design team at General Assembly. While I enjoyed the challenges and rewards of leadership, I realized I missed the hands-on aspects of design. My role at Chartbeat allowed me to combine these passions, working as an individual contributor while also identifying and resolving issues related to team dynamics, tools, and processes. This experience ultimately led to my promotion to Director of Product Design, where I took on leadership initiatives that reshaped how our team worked and delivered value.

Key Initiatives

1. Standardizing the Hiring Process to Foster Growth

When I stepped into the Director role, my first priority was to backfill my previous position. I saw this as an opportunity to create a more efficient, equitable hiring process that would help us attract top talent and reduce bias.

• Challenge: At the time, Chartbeat had no formalized interview process or documented expectations for Product Designers at various levels.

• Solution: I developed a structured skills matrix based on open-source models, ensuring we had clear criteria for evaluating candidates at every stage, from phone screens to portfolio reviews and final interviews. This matrix became the foundation for our career ladders, aligning expectations internally and with external recruiters.

• Impact: The new process improved team alignment, reduced hiring time, and significantly increased the success rate of new hires. By setting clear expectations, we were able to bring on talented designers who were better positioned to thrive in their roles.

2. Implementing a Design System to Increase Quality and Efficiency

As a Senior Product Designer, I quickly recognized inefficiencies caused by a lack of standardized design patterns. We were often debating which components to use for new features, leading to delays and inconsistencies across the product.

• Challenge: Chartbeat’s rapid growth left it without a unified design system, resulting in inconsistent user experiences and slower development cycles.

• Solution: I spearheaded the creation of a design system, first introducing Abstract, a version control tool for Sketch files, to foster collaboration. Then, I secured buy-in from leadership by co-owning an OKR with the Director of Front-End Engineering. We appointed two project leads—one designer and one engineer—who drove the initiative forward, ensuring both design and technical decisions were made cohesively.

• Impact: The design system drastically reduced the time required to build new features, allowing us to launch a complex MVP in just a few weeks—a process that previously took months. The system improved collaboration between teams and increased design consistency across our products.

3. Revamping the Product Development Process for Better Velocity

By 2019, our product development process was stalling, leading to frustration across teams and suboptimal outcomes. We needed a more agile approach that would improve velocity and transparency.

• Challenge: The existing process was too rigid, leading to knowledge silos and inefficiencies in product development.

• Solution: I led a collaborative effort with peers in Product and Engineering to redesign the process. We introduced six-week cycles where project owners wrote pitch documents outlining the scope, goals, and team requirements. These cycles allowed us to pivot more effectively and ensure each team had the right mix of skills to achieve their objectives.

• Impact: This shift resulted in better team velocity, reduced silos, and greater transparency across the organization. We were able to deliver features faster and with greater alignment to company goals, such as Image Testing and Single Sign-On (SSO) integrations.

4. Aligning Teams with Design Principles

As my team grew and we onboarded new designers, I realized that aligning on design principles was crucial for consistent collaboration. Our principles served as a guide for creating user-centric, scalable, and emotionally resonant designs.

• Challenge: Without a shared set of design principles, newer team members had difficulty aligning their work with the company's overall product and design vision.

• Solution: I facilitated workshops to develop a set of core design principles that reflected our product’s goals and our customers’ needs. Below were the final principles.

Consider each customer’s journey
We want Chartbeat to feel like a knowledgeable partner who understands you and how we fit into your life.

• Start by identifying your target customer(s)

• Create holistic solutions that span the tools and channels they need to.

• Leverage our product suite and other channels like emails and our support site.

• Understand when a single solution is appropriate and when we need multiple solutions for different use cases.

Bring focus and clarity
We don’t want to overwhelm customers with mountains of data. We want to help them focus on what’s important so they can easily find what they need.

• Strive for simplicity. Be diligent about editing out all but what is essential.

• Look for opportunities to highlight what’s important, rather than making users look for it themselves.

• Look for opportunities to use progressive disclosure to bring focus and allow for deeper dives.

• Help users understand how to think about their data, and when possible, what they can do next.

Be forward-looking
We want to create solutions that can evolve easily along with our customers’ needs. We aim to create patterns that are modular and can be reused in various solutions by any team.

• Start by referring to our Design System and try to use existing styles and patterns.

• Help evolve our Design System when something is missing or needs to be more flexible.

• When designing a solution, think about how it could scale to accommodate more data or functionality.

• Look for opportunities to combine multiple similar solutions into a singular one.

Design for emotion
Our goal is to present data in a way that resonates with our audience of storytellers. We use craft, from micro-interactions to copy, to add a human touch that evokes emotion and inspires confidence.

• Strive for the highest level of craft that inspires confidence in our brand.

• Use language that is familiar to our audience.

• Look for opportunities to infuse delight, while recognizing situations where it’d be inappropriate.

• When designing dynamic real-time tools, avoid making them feel frenetic or stressful.

• Aim to make Chartbeat feel friendly and easy to use, and more like a consumer app than

5. Creating Career Ladders to Drive Talent Retention

One of my early projects as Director was to create formal career ladders for the Product Design team. I recognized that clear career pathways were essential for retaining talent and setting transparent growth expectations.

• Challenge: Without a structured framework for career progression, designers lacked clarity on how to advance, and the team risked losing top talent.

• Solution: Building on the skills matrix I had developed for hiring, I created dual-track career ladders, allowing for growth as both individual contributors and managers. I also introduced the role of Staff Designer to provide senior designers with a path to more advanced positions without needing to transition into management.

• Impact: This initiative gave designers a clearer sense of their growth potential and led to increased retention by providing opportunities for advancement. It also positioned Design as a strategic function within the company, capable of influencing key decisions at the highest levels.

Like our hiring skills matrix, we leveraged many open source projects including Buzzfeed’s role descriptions and the career ladder developed by Peter Merholz at Snagajob.