Scaling a design practice

The situation

I joined Spire Digital in 2015 as the third designer on the team.

Spire was a product design and engineering agency working with everyone from small startups to Fortune 500 companies, across every industry, no two engagements the same. The design team was small. Two mid-level designers, a creative director, and me. Within a couple of years, all three of them were gone. The creative director role was never replaced.

That was scary. It was also an opening.

I stepped into the gap. I helped rebuild the practice, define how designers worked with engineers and product, and establish the standards a growing team needed to hold together. I did that work without a director title for years, because it needed to be done and I was the one who could do it.

My role

At Spire, I wasn't just an asset assigned to a project. I was the main point of contact with clients. I led teams of designers, engineers, and product managers, and I was accountable for what those teams delivered.

The work I was most proud of wasn't the outputs. It was the capability we left behind.

A good example is Ombud, an established but small company that came to Spire for design help. I worked with them for years. By the time the engagement ended, I had helped them hire their own designers, build an internal product design practice from scratch, and establish their process, documentation, standards, and product vision.

They didn't just get a delivered product. They left with the ability to keep building.

Building the team

Growing from 3 to 20+ designers over six years required more than good hiring. It required a practice. Documented standards and ways of working that functioned regardless of who was doing the work or where they were doing it from.

The core challenge was quality control. We were hiring designers globally and putting them directly in front of clients and cross-functional teams with high expectations and tight deadlines. A designer stepping into a new engagement needed to be credible from day one.

My approach every time:

• Met with the designer, their product manager, and their engineers together.
• Asked what the team needed from the designer and how they needed it.
• Documented it and shared it with everyone involved.

Expectations weren't coming from me alone. They were coming from the people the designer was actually working with. That closed most gaps before they became problems.

The rotation system

Consulting environments punish designers who only know one project. Client work pivots constantly. A project can stall, change scope, or end with no warning.

So I started rotating designers across projects quarterly. Every quarter, a designer moved to new work.

The effect I didn't anticipate was on overtime. Before the rotation, designers would rather work late than spend time onboarding someone else onto their project. Handing work off felt more expensive than absorbing it. Once rotation was the norm, that calculation flipped. Files were organized because they had to be. Context was written down because someone else would need it in 90 days. Work could be shared quickly instead of absorbed by one person, and the overtime went away.

That was a system problem, not a people problem. Nobody was working late because they wanted to.

The CPO project

At some point the CPO pulled me in on a problem. Two numbers were underperforming. Realized Rate, the revenue generated per designer per hour. And Utilization, the percentage of billable hours per designer per week.

I spent time talking directly to designers and the teams around them. I wasn't looking for someone to blame. I was looking for friction.

What I found was that designers didn't know when to pivot when they were blocked, and team members didn't know how to flag that a designer was blocked. Work stalled. Time was wasted. By the end of the week the numbers looked bad and nobody could point to why.

So I documented the process each team should follow and walked through it with every person involved. Not just the designer, but their product manager and engineers too. I made sure blockers had owners. I made sure designers knew what to do while they were waiting.

The acquisition

In 2021, Spire was acquired. Acquisitions are disorienting even when they go well.

We had real change. Turnover, restructuring, a larger company's culture absorbing a smaller one. And we still didn't have a design director. Leadership on the design team during the acquisition fell to me, informally but actually. I was the primary driver of communication and process across the team, in the office and remote.

One thing that had to change was design critiques. Before the acquisition they were manageable. After it, the team was busier, more spread out, and working across time zones and languages. A single all-hands critique didn't work anymore. I split it into a smaller in-office critique, which gave the core team something steady during a period of constant change, and distributed critiques structured around the connection problem rather than just the feedback problem.

The most memorable outcome came from a designer on the team who was struggling with her group. Eight people. Six of them weren't native English speakers. She was frustrated they weren't meeting expectations and couldn't understand why.

The solution was Spanish Fridays. Every Friday standup was Spanish only. No English unless it was an emergency. Native English speakers had to use Google Translate. The rest of the team, for the first time, got to operate in a language they were comfortable in.

What happened wasn't a miracle. It was just what happens when people feel like they're on equal footing. People who had been quiet started speaking up. They flagged confusion earlier. The designer understood why communication had felt difficult, not because her team was difficult, but because they had been navigating a disadvantage she hadn't noticed. The critiques got better. The work got better.

How it ended

Once the team had stabilized and a creative director was finally brought in, I left.

The new company had a reputation for layoffs. I had stayed as long as I felt I was needed. My job felt done, and staying longer would have been for my own comfort, not the team's benefit.

What I'd do differently

Advocate earlier and more directly for the title that matched the work.

For years I did the work of a design director without the title. I told myself it was an opportunity, and it was. But I also left value on the table, in compensation, recognition, and the formal authority that would have made some of the harder conversations easier.

Doing the work and asking for the recognition aren't in conflict. I know that now.