After a major reduction in force, I unexpectedly became the most senior designer at Carbonite and inherited a design and research function that needed to rebuild trust, momentum, and operating clarity. This case study outlines how I helped the team define its principles, engagement models, communication rhythms, and systems for supporting more product teams with limited resources.
Challenges
- Rebuild trust after a substantial reduction in force
- Step into design leadership inside a 1000-person enterprise with $200M annual revenue
- Support more teams while operating with limited design and research resources
Approach
- Prioritized active listening and reforging trust across the team and organization
- Co-authored a charter defining principles, goals, service models, communications, and impact stories
- Initiated a design system and supporting processes to stabilize prioritization and delivery
Outcomes
- Returned the team to a healthier, more engaged, and growing state
- Increased visibility through sprint, quarterly, and annual impact reporting
- Secured a dedicated share of product roadmaps for design recommendations
Lesson 1: Establish design principles
I worked with the team to co-author a vision of what “good” meant to us. I shamelessly leaned into the company obsession with Star Wars. We revisited these principles regularly in retros.
Lesson 2: Establish a communications strategy
We established a regular format and cadence for showing our progress toward those principles with clear, plain language.
Lesson 3: Define engagement models
We defined and communicated a few core models of engagement with the new design team. I used the metaphor of man-to-man vs zone coverage to help shift the expectations about how our team was capable of working.
Lesson 4: Author a skills matrix
As an engineering-led company, Carbonite lacked a common language for our expectations of designers. This had resulted in disjointed hiring in the past, including a notable gap in visual design because the company just didn’t know what words to use to hire for that skillset. I worked with our HR team to build out a skills matrix for each discipline in the design function which we could then use to hire more efficiently and strategically.