Communication is king

Executive summary

In July 2023, our EVP of Experience at Angel asked me to lead the product design team. The brief wasn't to design more screens. It was to build the function.

Today, six senior product designers and a design system lead ship across web, mobile, and TV, from streaming to theatrical ticketing. The team I built has been stable since 2023. The design system I started before taking the lead role is now led by one of my designers, who's pushing it to its next phase.

This is the case study of how that happened. What I inherited, what I built, what I got wrong before I got it right, and what I would carry forward to the next role.

Business challenge

Angel is a consumer entertainment company shipping across three platforms. Web, mobile, and TV. Feature teams like theatrical, Guild voting, and the filmmaker experience run across all three. Every surface is consumer-facing. Every surface carries the brand. The company needed design as a function, not a service.

When I joined as a senior product designer in August 2022, design at Angel was a collection of individual contributors working hard inside their product teams. There wasn't a design org. There were designers.

That had been good enough to get Angel to the moment it was in. It wasn't going to be good enough for what came next.

Organizational challenge

Angel is a flat organization. Each product designer is allocated to a team that reports to their PM based on platform or feature.

In practice, that meant new product designers came in, got dropped into a team, and had to figure it out. There was no shared craft language. No hiring rubric. No onboarding. When I joined the TV team in January 2023, TV didn't have a design system. There hadn't been a designer on TV before me.

Designers were siloed. They worked hard inside their own initiatives but often didn't know what other designers were doing. Experiences felt fragmented across surfaces. And because no one was looking across the org, designers occasionally ended up working on the same problem without realizing it. Nobody was being lazy. Nobody had time to be everywhere at once.

That was the problem the EVP of Experience was hiring me to solve.

Leadership role

In July 2023, my EVP of Experience pulled me alongside him as Lead Product Designer.

The role was different from what most lead designer roles are. I wasn't being asked to be the senior IC on the team. I was being asked to extend the EVP of Experience's reach across the design org. Hire designers. Onboard them. Run 1:1s. Build the operating model. Set the bar for craft. Make the function legible to the company.

When I started, there were three senior product designers on the team plus me. Today there are seven: six senior product designers and a design system lead. I personally hired six of the current team.

Strategy

I came in with one operating principle that I held above every other thing I tried to build.

Communication is king.

In every meeting I was in for the first year, I pushed communication. With one another, with other teams, with anyone that might be involved in what you were trying to build. Walk down the hall. Hop on a quick Slack huddle. Talk to the engineer or the PM or the other designer before you went deeper into the work. I said it so often it became expected to hear. That was fine. I wanted it to be anticipated.

1. 01

   Walk down the hall.

2. 02

   Hop on a quick Slack huddle.

3. 03

   Talk to the engineer or the PM or the other designer.

Before you went deeper into the work.

The reason was simple. Siloed designers can be talented. They can't be a function. Function-level design requires people who can see across the org and act on what they see. That doesn't happen without communication being treated as the actual job, not an overhead cost.

Everything else I built came out of that principle.

Cross-functional alignment

The first thing communication unlocked was parity across surfaces.

Before I took the lead role, I had built the first version of the Photon design system in late 2022. Tokens, components, patterns. The goal was to make the web, mobile, and TV experiences feel like they belonged to the same company.

Photon got the surface-level consistency moving. But the system only worked if the designers were talking to each other about it. The components are useful. The conversations about which component and why are what make the surfaces actually feel coherent. That's the part the design system can't do on its own.

Once communication was the norm rather than the exception, parity stopped being something I had to chase. It started happening because the designers were treating each other as resources, not as competitors for the same patterns.

Photon is currently being pushed to its next phase by one of my designers who got passionate about taking it further. My job there is to support his work, remove blockers, and create the conditions for him to lead it.

That's the pattern. I start something. A designer takes it over. I get out of the way.

The team's operating model

Communication was the principle. The team's operating model is how the principle showed up day to day.

Hiring

For senior product designers, I look for four things. Strong UX craft. Good UI aesthetics. Empathy for the company's business goals and strategy. And the ability to use AI tools in real product design work, not as a side project. Beyond those four, I look for designers who lead initiatives. Who walk into a problem before being assigned to it. Who make a case for their idea instead of waiting for someone to tell them what to build. That's what senior means on my team. The portfolio shows me what they can do. The interview shows me how they think about what they did.

Onboarding

When I joined Angel, no one had built the path in yet. I took what I'd learned, then asked the other product designers where they'd gotten stuck when they joined. I wrote the doc based on our collected experiences. It lives in Notion and covers what a new designer needs in their first week: software setup, a walkthrough of the Photon design system, the team map and how to partner with each person on it, and the projects currently in flight. Day one, they meet with me. Then with the EVP of Experience. Then with the product designers whose work connects to theirs, so the communication chain starts early. Most new designers have their first PR out by the end of week one. I follow up a few weeks in to ask what was missing, and the doc gets sharper with every hire.

Reviews and 1:1s

I lead with three models. A team design review, where we collectively hear from two designers and give constructive feedback. A bi-weekly peer design review, where two designers sharpen one another. Then a monthly 1:1 with me, where I get a chance to mentor, coach, and help with career development. I take blockers to leadership when leadership is the right place to take them. I still close every 1:1 by asking, "How can I help?" It's wired into who I am. I find joy in serving those around me. The designer rarely takes me up on it, but it happens when it matters.

It started as a pilot, and it's working extremely well. The conversations are richer. Team members have more context on one another's work. The team is more collaborative.

Junior to senior weeks

I'll occasionally allocate myself as a junior product designer to one of my senior product designers for a full week. They lead. I follow. I take their direction and execute what they need. I give feedback only if I think it's warranted. The rest of the time, I'm there to move work forward at their pace, on their priorities. This is one of the practices I'm proudest of. My designers tell me it's some of the most useful time I spend with them. It also keeps me honest about what the work is actually like for the people doing it.

Annual reviews

I take notes after every 1:1 across the year. What they're working on. Strengths I'm seeing. Areas to watch. Areas to grow. At the end of the year, I compile the notes into a summary. The review itself starts with the designer doing a self-evaluation. What they think they did well. What they think they could grow in. What they think they need to improve. Then I share my observations. More often than not, they line up with what the designer is already sensing. Then we close on three goals for the coming year. One thing to accomplish. One thing to improve. One way to help with the company's goals for the year.

The annual review is the part of the system that surprised me most. The designers come in already knowing where they are. The review just confirms it. That's a sign the 1:1s are doing their job.

Decision-making

The biggest call I made in year two came from the EVP of Experience.

Network effects. He talked about them constantly as a property the company should be building into the product. I carried that down to the design team. Every new feature, every experiment, every variant. I started asking where the network effects were. Sometimes the answer was nowhere. That was fine. I wanted the question to be a habit.

To this day, when I see a designer release a feature, I ask: where can we drive network effects as an experiment, or as a variant of what we're deploying? Not every feature needs them. But I want every designer to have asked the question.

1. The EVP of Experience

   Talked about network effects constantly.

2. Me

   Carried it down to the design team.

3. The design team

   Every new feature, every experiment, every variant.

Where are the network effects?

That's how I think about transmitting principles down a team. Don't make it a policy. Make it a habit. The EVP of Experience made it a habit for me. Now, I'm working to make it a habit for my team.

Outcomes

Here is what the function looks like.

Lessons learned

About a year into the lead role, I asked our COO to run a survey for me. I wanted to hear from my designers, my peers, and the leaders above me. What was working, what wasn't, where I could get better. No one asked me to do it. I just wanted to know what I couldn't see on my own.

The piece of feedback that stuck with me was this: my words have weight.

I hadn't realized it. When I talked to one of my designers, I thought I was talking to them the way one designer talks to another. Sharing an idea, kicking it around, thinking out loud. They were hearing their leader tell them what to do. The gap between what I meant and what they heard was bigger than I knew.

That changed how I talked to my team. When I'm sharing a designer's take on something, I say so out loud. An opinion, a critique, a different way to approach it. I tell them I'm putting my designer hat on. So they know the difference between their lead asking them to do something and a fellow designer offering a thought.

The other thing that shifted, slowly, was how much I was directing. The designers who grew the most were the ones I stopped over-directing. I encouraged them to find something they were passionate about, get the right people in the room, and make the case themselves. I came in behind them to clear blockers, not to set the direction. The 1:1 stopped being about accountability and became a feedback loop. I started encouraging iteration over perfection.

Every designer on my team has grown over the past few years, each in their own way. That was the goal. Not to build them in my image, but to build a place where strong designers could level up alongside each other.