How I develop successful teams
Leadership | 10 minute read
OVERVIEWBuilding successful design teams today means working with new realities. AI accelerates creation, automation handles production work, and anyone can generate designs with easy-to-use tools. The real opportunity lies in focusing on what humans do best while using technology as a multiplier. With this in mind, these four plays guide how I develop design teams that deliver measurable business impact through thoughtful adaptation to constant change. Let's explore each in detail.
1.
Recruit for a modern team
Portfolio quality catches my attention, but these traits consistently appear in the best design professionals I've had the honor of leading: curiosity, empathy, comfort with ambiguity, adaptability, and developing proficiency with AI. I also prioritize remote collaboration skills and build teams with diverse perspectives that include user representation.
Essential traits
These traits have been consistent indicators of the best design professionals I've worked with: They're naturally curious about how things work. When presented with questions, they ask follow-ups and then delve deeply to understand the intricacies of the problem to be solved. They empathize easily without being told, recognizing how others think and feel. They work comfortably with uncertainty, moving forward without perfect information, then testing assumptions quickly. They adapt as technology evolves, experimenting with new tools and techniques, then tweaking and optimizing their methods. One of my favorite interview questions is to ask about a time when they had to pivot their direction based on unexpected feedback late in the design process. Answers reveal a great deal about a candidate's ability to recover and adapt to new knowledge.
AI fluency and judgement
Every member on my team must understand the fundamentals of how generative AI works and use the tools as experimenters. AI will evolve the design process, and understanding its fundamentals is crucial for utilizing it productively. I look for thoughtful use of generalist tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, as well as specialist tools like Figma Make, Lovable, and Bolt. But just as importantly, I want to understand their judgment about when AI helps versus when it hurts. I invite the candidates to share how they've used AI tools in their design process, and then tell me about a time when they chose not to use them. The best answers demonstrate a balance of experimentation and judgment. Red flags include candidates who either dismiss AI entirely or mindlessly believe it can solve everything.
Collaboration and diversity
Distributed teams require exceptional communication skills, and strong candidates clearly demonstrate these behaviors. During portfolio reviews, I ask to see the raw Figma files to inspect the use and flow of comments as the design evolves. Did the candidate make progress without relying on constant check-ins? For team diversity, I blend personalities and perspectives to encourage better communications, faster problem-solving, and less groupthink. I support this by demonstrating mutual respect and maintaining open and transparent communication, which fosters a sense of psychological safety.
Fidelity Go: Appealing to a new audienceTo capture Fidelity Go's target audience of millennial women, I deliberately hired a designer who represented that demographic. When her research-backed hero image met internal resistance for challenging our brand, I stepped in to champion her work. By presenting a unified front to leadership, we won their approval. The decision paid off with her image driving higher conversion in live A/B testing against on-brand imagery.
2.
Build a solid foundation
Design operations have evolved to architecting systems that amplify human judgment where it's most meaningful, while leveraging automation to make more room for higher-value activities. A solid foundation now must enable teams to scale design intent more broadly in ever-changing conditions.
Foster a culture of rapid experimentation
The fundamentals of hypothesis-driven experimentation persist by creating an environment where it's safe for teams to test, fail, revise, and repeat. The old constraints of testing just a handful of concepts over weeks of planning have disappeared. Today's teams are generating dozens of high-fidelity variations using AI-assisted design and coding. Leveraging unmoderated testing platforms reaches more participants than ever, and analyzing the results to derive meaningful insights comes quicker. With the cost so low, today's design professionals must curate the process to ensure quality testing, valid synthesis, and insightful results. Establishing 'experimentation playbooks' can help teams focus their efforts on testing the right problems.
Co-create a generative design system
Design systems have rapidly evolved from primarily UI governance to powerful UI generation assets. While still critical in ensuring good design and development practices scale consistently, these systems are now essential components for AI-generated experiences. Alongside UI necessities like color tokens, components, and patterns, design systems are looking beyond the surface to provide consistency in non-deterministic experiences, such as AI assistants. It's now vital to co-create and manage design systems with technical partners, as these systems rapidly grow more capable and complex.
Establish guiding principles
Design principles are living values that teams use to guide and evaluate design direction. To be effective, principles must facilitate and scale good decision-making across increasingly complex systems. Day-to-day engagement with principles ensures customers ultimately experience what a product team intends. To illustrate, when considering a new feature for a conversational UI, a principle such as "Protect a user's flow state" may enable a team to favor ideas that subtly enhance the experience instead of disrupting it. Review your principles periodically to assess their effectiveness and relevance. Ask, "How did this value drive better decision-making this last quarter? What values need to evolve to facilitate more effective team discussions? What value, if it existed, would have allowed us to avoid a costly mistake?"
Extend design tools into the ecosystem
Design tools can no longer solely exist in isolation. Instead, consider how they can operate as nodes within a broader product development framework. For example, favor a knowledge base based on its ability to connect via protocol with your primary design tool. This way, AI-assisted design tools like Figma Make can consume knowledge, such as design systems and personas, through MCP (Model Context Protocol) connections, thereby speeding up the ideation process. Design leaders must work closely with their R&D peers to consider the whole when evaluating tools. Doing so avoids lock-ins or unintended consequences of connections. The goal is to amplify human decision-making, rather than automating the entire process away.
A framework for decision makingWhen shaping NetDocuments' next-generation platform, the team was struggling to align on its core beliefs. Review sessions would often stall on subjective questions, such as "Is this feature helpful or just creepy?" This indicated that we lacked a shared framework for making critical decisions. To address this, I led a cross-functional exercise involving the team to co-create a set of core design principles. One of the most critical of which was "Anticipate user needs and intent." This principle immediately clarified our most problematic debates. Instead of arguing in the abstract, the team could ask, "Does this bring the right thing forward at the right time?" It provided us with the foundation to design a more subtle and trustworthy platform, enabling us to ship a much stronger product faster.
3.
Commit to their development
For design organizations to drive impact and encourage retention, design leaders must help design professionals develop strategic influence across teams.
Rethinking design career progression
Mastery of craft used to be the primary measure of career progression for design professionals. While still important, it's now essential that design leaders guide and measure how design pros expand their influence as they progress. To what extent a designer influenced decisions and delivered cross-functional outcomes becomes a vital indicator of increasing skills. For example, a more junior designer can exert influence on the direction of a specific feature, whereas more senior designers align and shape approaches across capabilities and domains. A program that aligns designers with roles beyond R&D, such as sales, support, and marketing, provides them with broad exposure to opportunities for cross-functional alignment.
Build their people skills
Great design professionals are master communicators. Foundational skills include presenting and communicating designs, as well as receiving and processing critiques of those ideas. To strengthen their strategic impact, they should develop facilitation skills such as Design Thinking or Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), which can help larger teams navigate the creative process. To sharpen these skills, have each team member take a turn leading facilitation during weekly design critiques or include it in a personal development plan, where a manager can provide guidance and resources to support upskilling.
Developing influence At Thomson Reuters, I managed a brilliant designer who excelled at visual design. His craft was solid, but he struggled to connect the "why" behind his impressive imagery, often deferring to louder voices. Recognizing his potential, I guided him in developing a plan to improve his communication skills. A core tenet was always to ground his rationale in the language of user outcomes and business goals. Then, we would pre-game stakeholder presentations through role-playing. The change was transformative. He started confidently rooting his design rationale in the language of outcomes and objectives. Within months, he was co-leading a significant initiative that shaped Thomson Reuters' first iPad app. It was a powerful reminder that developing talent includes building their influence alongside their craft.
4.
Shape the conditions for their success
Design is a team sport. Not only do better solutions arise from many minds, but great design requires the right conditions to flourish. Grounding activity in strategic objectives, elevating the design skills of others, and orchestrating experiences beyond the UI are now how design teams must operate.
Connect team activity to strategic objectives
Effectively communicating and contextualizing how the organization's strategic objectives tie to design output is essential to show impact. Different roles employ different strategic language, so design leaders must adapt their language to each audience. For example, speaking to the board about innovation versus speaking to product management about velocity versus speaking with engineering about feasibility. A primary way to ensure that the design team understands business and technical strategies is by connecting the dots at every opportunity, such as project kick-offs, design critiques, and retrospectives. When showing designs, lead with the objective and end with evidence of how the design best serves that objective. Apply the same approach to any design team action. For example, rationalizing an expenditure for a new design tool, expanding staffing, or hiring an external research firm should show clearly how it supports the strategy.
Invite others into the design process
Over the years, I've surveyed product teams about what they would like to understand better about design. One theme that surfaces consistently is some flavor of "why does design seem so obvious once done?" This sentiment suggests that the design process remains mysterious and foreign to the other members of the R&D team. Solid concepts are easily dismissible when not well understood, so great design teams invite others into the design process. Focused workshops, such as design sprints or design thinking, or involving non-designers directly in user research, provide an immediate connection with end-user struggles. Recently, collaborative real-time coding platforms have provided a rich shared space for designer pros to work in real-time with product managers and developers. Once one understands the origin and evolution of a design, the mystery around the process recedes, allowing full teams to flourish.
Shift from gatekeepers to curators
In the past, I've often heard that a designer's "superpower" is turning ideas into images. With the ability today for anyone to generate infinite, high-fidelity, interactive visuals, design teams must focus on determining which ideas are worth visualizing. Design teams must "shift left" to engage earlier in strategic conversations to ask questions such as: "Is this the right problem to solve? What does a positive user outcome look like? How will a positive outcome further our strategic objectives?" With a flood of ideas, the designer must become a curator, helping team members explore, sift, and shape ideas against human, business, and technological needs. This shift must also highlight traditionally challenging aspects, such as non-UI system behaviors or secondary effects of AI that risk being overlooked.
Demystifying designAt Fidelity Institutional, I found that engineering teams often resisted our work because our design process was a "black box" to them. To demystify it, I personally led a series of Design Thinking workshops, having engineers apply our methods to their own challenges. The impact was immediate: once engineers understood how we worked, our proposals were more readily received. More importantly, the workshops gave us a shared language to navigate disagreements, leading to stronger relationships and ultimately, better products.
TakeawayThe future of design belongs to teams that adapt with intention. By blending human judgment with AI acceleration, cultivating diverse talent, and shaping the right conditions for success, I lead organizations that not only keep pace with change but turn it into a lasting advantage.