Design had a system, guidelines and meetings. None of it mattered yet.
I joined mid-reorganisation, as the previous Design Lead was leaving. The team felt left out and unmotivated — not because of process, but because design was treated as an output rather than part of product thinking.
No one was to blame. Product teams were busy and didn't know how to work with designers rather than around them. Designers were too busy with the next request to teach every team they touched.
And the measure of success wasn't morale or my performance as a manager. A partner might sell an iPhone on our loan and later call support — one customer moving across products we treated as separate. Success meant the product getting better.
Four moves, no positional authority
Teach
“Design team for dummies” workshops for product owners. A whiteboard exercise made one point concrete: most of design is research and discussion, not making things pretty.
Negotiate
I spoke directly with Product Line Leads and managers regarding their quarterly plans, asking that time be allocated specifically for design initiatives and improvements which my team and I thought were important. I made it clear that design, including research, needed to have its own item in the plan and should not be quietly included in the development time.
Prove it in my own work
While designing Partner Portal features, I proposed the Partnership Management platform — new users for Inbank, lower back-office costs.
See the case →
Give engineering a win
“Dopamine tasks”: 4 hours every sprint for small UI improvements with no architectural cost. Visible progress, room for designers' ideas, less friction between disciplines.
What changed
In my last two quarters, I saw the quarterly plan before the quarter started — and could shape it. Not fully fixed, but design was finally in the room.
I worked in situations where teams did not know how to collaborate with us. I managed negotiations by arranging for someone else to help, and I did the product work myself to show how it could be done. It was the mix of these actions, not just one, that turned the service department into a product-focused team.