Portfolio / Design Leadership
Creating the Conditions for Great Design Work
How I lead a distributed design team through clarity, growth and trust.
How I lead a distributed design team through clarity, growth and trust.
The rituals are not the point. My job is to create an environment in which designers understand what matters, feel safe raising problems and have enough support and autonomy to do their best work.
I lead a distributed team of around 15 designers working across different experience areas and channels. They support multiple squads, collaborate closely with Product and Technology, and navigate dependencies across commercial teams and local design organisations. Three design leads in the team also have people-management responsibilities.
At this scale, leadership by proximity does not work. I cannot be in every conversation or personally approve every decision — and I should not try. My responsibility is to translate complexity into something people can act on, create visibility without micromanagement and help other leaders succeed.
One of our simplest practices is a regular PPP check-in: Progress, Plans and Problems. Everyone shares what has moved forward, what they plan to focus on next and anything making progress harder. I do not use it to monitor activity. I use it to understand where the team needs a decision, a trade-off or leadership support.
The problems are often organisational rather than design-related: a dependency on another team, unclear ownership, an unresolved decision or too much work collecting with one person. Once visible, I can review priorities with the design leads, move support where it is needed and reset expectations with the affected squads.
This matters in sports betting and iGaming, where priorities can change quickly. Flexibility is essential, but it should not mean asking people to absorb unlimited change. If something new becomes urgent, we must be equally clear about what will move, pause or need additional support.
I meet with the three design leads every two weeks to compare what is happening across their areas. We discuss delivery pressure, designer capacity and whether assignments need to flex. This gives the leads real influence over wider team decisions and helps us avoid optimising one area at the expense of another.
Development should not be confined to an annual review. Every week, the team holds a UX feedback session where designers can share work at different stages, explain the problem they are solving and ask for the input they need. It is not a final approval gate; it is a place for questions, constructive challenge and shared learning.
Presenters and facilitators rotate. This distributes ownership of design quality and gives people a safe place to practise communication and facilitation. I have watched designers who were initially less comfortable presenting become confident contributors, guide team discussions and apply those skills when facilitating workshops with Product and Technology.
12 UX capabilities across 4 proficiency stages. Self and manager perspectives. Previous assessments retained so progress becomes visible over time. A conversation tool, not a scoreboard.
Personal development goals support longer-term growth. Quarterly business goals describe measurable contributions aligned with team and company priorities. Both matter. People should understand the impact expected from them now without losing sight of the career they are building.
UX is too broad for everyone to become an expert in every discipline. One designer may want to deepen a craft skill, another may want to facilitate more effectively, and another may want to become stronger at influencing stakeholders. We identify what matters to the person's ambitions and role, then find practical opportunities to develop it through real work.
Some of the most rewarding evidence has been watching designers I hired at a junior stage grow in confidence, independence and responsibility. That growth is never attributable to one framework or one manager. It comes from an environment that repeatedly gives people useful feedback, meaningful ownership and safe opportunities to stretch.
A distributed team does not become connected simply because everyone occasionally works from the same building. Our monthly in-person sessions are protected for conversations that benefit from having the whole team together: show-and-tells, strategic discussions, workshops, brainstorms and topics affecting several areas.
I avoid filling that time with updates that could have been shared asynchronously. The purpose is participation — giving people space to contribute, learn from work outside their squad and strengthen relationships beyond immediate delivery.
Consistency also comes from the three design leads and the shared resources around the work. The leads support designers more closely and bring context from their respective areas. Shared templates give people a reliable starting point for recurring activities and deliverables, reducing duplicated effort without turning the process into bureaucracy.
Individual development, feedback and support
Challenges, capacity and leadership alignment
Progress, plans, problems and early action
Design quality, learning and facilitation practice
Workshops, strategic topics and connection
Help without waiting for a scheduled meeting
Being approachable and holding people accountable are not opposites. People are more likely to take responsibility when expectations are clear and they feel safe raising a problem early. I try to be transparent, remove unnecessary complexity and make it easy for people to ask for help without taking ownership away from them.
When someone is not meeting expectations, the first step is an honest conversation with clear, specific feedback. I try to understand what is contributing to the situation: unclear priorities, limited experience, a capability gap, lack of support or simply too much competing work. We then agree what needs to change and what support will be available.
If coaching and informal support do not lead to the required change, expectations need to become more structured and measurable. That is not a withdrawal of care. It is part of being fair to the person and responsible to everyone else in the team.
Accountability also applies to me. In a matrix organisation, many obstacles cannot be solved through design craft alone. I need to maintain relationships with Product, Technology, commercial stakeholders and local design teams; clarify responsibilities; escalate constructively; and protect the team from carrying organisational problems individually.
Any useful ceremony can become unhelpful if its purpose is forgotten. PPP can turn into status reporting. Feedback can become a manager's approval gate. An in-person day can become a sequence of presentations that could have been an email. I do not want to protect meetings simply because they already exist; I want to protect the outcomes they are meant to create.
I look for observable signals: problems being raised earlier, designers giving one another useful feedback, people becoming more confident presenting and facilitating, leads making decisions within their areas, and workload conversations happening before someone becomes overwhelmed.