Great designers can underperform if the conditions for influence are not present.

Maturing the design team was a passion that became infrastructure and management experience.

As a contributor, I initiated and hosted a weekly workshop series that offered (1) a safe space for curiosity and play (2) discussions targeting craft, strategy, and leadership readiness, and (3) design system advancements through consensus and documentation.

This led to my role as interim design manager where I oversaw design strategy for 3 teams, contributed to quarterly planning, and led vision, roadmap, and retrospective workshops.

A designer’s role is to empathize, so growing their skills, influence, and bandwidth are powerful ways to elevate company culture, customer satisfaction, and cross-team collaboration. We moved from uncertainty and fear to knowledge and empowerment to lead.

Reflection: Raising design quality standards is more sustainable if done as a system. Lone stars are great to gloat about, however it's important to feed regularly expertise back into the teams. The "weakest link" is the baseline of how design is perceived.

Lift the baseline as a team. Make it everyone's job to redefine and uphold standards. Let them know you have their back no matter what. Then design, and thereby, user experience, will be respected and revered.