Design Leadership
Product Design at Watermark had become a high-stakes lottery.
Depending on the scrum team, the experience with Design ranged from highly collaborative to completely dysfunctional. This inconsistency wasn't just a culture problem. It was also an operational bottleneck.
Misaligned expectations between Engineering, Product, and Design led to painful sprints and a lack of trust. The designers felt vulnerable and isolated, while the scrum teams felt Design was a "black box" that slowed down implementation.
Discovery
I didn't rely on HR surveys. I conducted a systemic audit of our cross-functional handoffs. I sat with Product Owners and Lead Engineers to understand why they were frustrated.
I uncovered a fundamental gap in transparency. Engineering didn't need "perfect" mockups; they needed to be involved in the "ugly" low-fidelity stage to assess technical feasibility before a single pixel was moved. Meanwhile, designers needed the psychological safety to push back on requirements without fear of being seen as "blockers."
Affinity Map
Coaching
We needed to change the mental model of how Design integrated into the Agile lifecycle. We moved away from "Design as a Service" to "Design as a Strategic Partner."
Low-Fidelity Transparency: Designers were sharing their work too late in the process. By moving the refinement process into low-fi wireframes, we stripped away the preciousness of the work and allowed Engineering to provide feedback when it was more easily acted on.
Trusting Yourself: Intuition isn’t a gut-feeling. It’s built through hours of research and discovery. These are valid, objective data points that inform a solution and should be listened to. I coached designers to have confidence in their intuition.
Standardization: I worked to implement shared Figma components and broader acceptance criteria. This reduced the "decision fatigue" for both designers and developers, allowing them to focus on complex problem-solving rather than debating UI patterns.
Problems & Impacts
Results
I implemented a Design Operations framework focused on Accountability and Visibility.
The Design Sprint Reset: I re-educated the scrum teams on the design process through hands-on design sprints, proving that design thinking is a tool for "unsticking" complex problems, not just for making things look modern.
The "Day in the Life" Initiative: I brought the backstage work of design to the entire company. I wanted to demonstrate the rigor of our user research and the complexity of our workflows.
We did more than build trust.
We repaired the fractured relationships by delivering reliability. Designers now have the confidence to speak up as senior partners in the room, and Product Owners have stopped seeing Design as a hurdle.
We built a repeatable, scalable system that allows us to move with velocity without sacrificing the quality of the user experience.
“We should all embrace design thinking and start being more curious about our problems before landing on a solution.”