Org and Team Design
How I built leadership capacity while the Casino Design, Research, and Content organization grew from 3 to 15.
Leadership question
How do you scale quality and decision-making when the organization grows faster than one manager's reach?
Case at a glance
Core org growth
3 to 15
The multidisciplinary Design, Research, and Content organization grew from 3 to 15, with a peak of 21.
Direct reports
8
Managed up to 8 direct reports across product design and related disciplines.
Career promotions
6
Supported career growth across individual contributor, senior, lead designer, and manager levels.
The core Casino Design, Research, and Content organization grew from 3 to 15, with a peak of 21. The challenge was no longer whether one manager could review more work. It was whether the organization could add people and product scope without making quality, career development, and executive communication depend on one person.
I managed up to 8 direct reports, supported 6 promotions, and developed 2 managers and 2 lead designers. My role shifted from carrying more decisions myself to building the people and practices that could carry them across the organization.
Challenge
More product areas, career needs, and executive partners made inconsistent hiring signals, delayed coaching, and unclear recommendations more likely.
Adding people alone would not solve that problem. The organization needed stronger hiring judgment, real development paths for emerging leaders, and a more direct way to bring product choices into senior forums.
I focused on three decisions: whom we hired, how managers and leads learned to carry broader ownership, and how design recommendations reached VP and SVP stakeholders.
My responsibility
The goal was not to create more management activity. It was to distribute leadership without lowering the quality bar.
Leadership decisions
Each decision addressed a different constraint: hiring signal, leadership capacity, and executive understanding.
01 Hiring
The decision
Use product thinking, craft, research judgment, collaboration, leadership potential, and organizational fit as shared interview signals across design, research, and leadership roles.
What changed
Hiring committees had a more consistent basis for evaluating candidates as the multidisciplinary organization grew.
02 Development
The decision
Connect coaching to live responsibility for critique, people development, product judgment, and communication rather than keeping growth plans separate from the work.
What changed
Two managers and two lead designers grew into broader coaching, critique, and decision responsibilities.
03 Executive influence
The decision
Frame senior conversations around the customer problem, choice, tradeoff, risk, and recommendation instead of walking executives through every design step.
What changed
Product and design direction became easier to discuss in All Hands, Product Vision, VP, and SVP forums.
Artifacts
Representative, redacted artifacts showing how product judgment and quality expectations became easier to discuss.
Experience principles framework
Prioritization matrix
Outcomes
The strongest evidence is the number of people who could take on broader responsibility as the team expanded.
Outcome
Helped grow the core organization from 3 to 15 across Design, Research, and Content, with a peak of 21.
Outcome
Managed up to 8 direct reports across a scope with 6 promotions, and developed 2 managers and 2 lead designers.
Outcome
Used shared hiring criteria and repeatable product, research, critique, and executive forums to make decisions easier to carry across the organization.
Reflection
I scaled leadership by developing people who could coach, judge, and communicate well without making every decision depend on me.
What We Learned
These principles shaped how I approached the next product and team decisions.
01
Organizational scale comes from managers and leads who can coach, decide, and communicate without constant escalation.
02
Critique scales when teams share explicit expectations and can explain the reasoning behind a decision.
03
I would develop managers and leads sooner so coaching, critique, and executive communication could scale before team growth increased the coordination load.
Leadership Conversations
Open to Product Design Director opportunities across industries.
Based in the U.S. and open to product design leadership opportunities.