Leading a studio
through change
When the studio lost its head of design, I kept four designers deployed, growing and selling design, and wrote down the career path nobody had.
The studio's head of design left in August, and he wasn't the first. A small team that had already watched colleagues go now watched its leader go too. Four designers, split between the US and the UK, were all asking the same question in different words: is design being wound down? One of them was between engagements. Meanwhile the company still had pursuits that needed a designer in the room, and clients who needed the work delivered on time.
I took on all of the job and none of the title. Staffing every designer, their growth and their wellbeing, the standard for the craft, and getting design into the deals that pay for the studio. I kept billing on my own client work the whole way through, because the studio couldn't afford a leader who stopped making things, and neither could I.
Heard before
managed.
I told the team on day one that nothing would be restructured in the first 30 days, then I kept that promise. Before I had a plan, I ran a health check in two sessions, one per time zone, because a team that's grieving needs to be heard before it's managed. We talked first and wrote things down afterwards. The board we made became the record of what people said, with no names attached.
A people decision first.
Three of the four wanted to move from execution toward strategy, and each named the same blocker: what they got staffed on. So I treated it as one problem with three faces. I placed every designer on work matched to where they wanted to grow, including the one who'd been between engagements, and where I could, on engagements they'd lead.
My read, not a measured result: an underused designer's rating ends up measuring the bench, not the designer.
Write down the path.
The written path stopped short. The ladder had no design leadership rung, and the competency tool had grown into a checklist of 300-plus items that nobody could use to answer "what does it take to get promoted?" I wrote a replacement: a unified career model with competencies across levels, a single track, and an explicit expectation for working with AI. It went to the team first, then to leadership and HR, and it's in review now.
I paired it with an AI fluency curriculum, six capability courses built for designers rather than borrowed from engineering, because every designer on the team had named AI as a goal for the year.
Sell design, don't wait for it.
Design only grows inside an engineering company if someone puts it in the pitch. I led design pursuits as the client lead: proposals, pricing conversations, and a live AI design demo in front of a healthcare platform's executive team, which then chose us. Two design-led engagements were won in two months, with a third client choosing us and the contract in progress.
How the team grew.
Two of the four now lead engagements as the client-facing design lead. Every designer has a recurring 1:1 with me on their work, their workload and how they're holding up. In a review earlier that year, one designer wrote: "I have never felt this level of support from a manager."
Four weeks
Every designer placed on client work, matched to where each wanted to grow.
Two new leads
Two designers now lead engagements as the client-facing design lead.
A written path
A unified career model and an AI curriculum, in review with leadership and HR.
Scope before work.
I'd put the role's scope in writing on day one. I took on the whole job and kept the old title, and nobody, me included, wrote down what the new job was. Leadership work got the leftovers of the calendar while client work took the mornings. The team never felt that, because I made sure of it. The person who did feel it was me. Next time the scope, the decision rights and the time come before the work, not after it.