Selected engagements

Situation

A large regional media network operating multiple digital products with distributed design teams across three offices. No unified team structure, no shared standards, no clear ownership model. Design output was inconsistent, reviews were ad hoc, and delivery timelines were unpredictable. Leadership had limited visibility into how design work was prioritized or how it connected to product goals.

Approach

• Conducted a full audit of the existing team structure, workflows, and decision points across all design teams
• Interviewed team leads, product managers, and engineering counterparts to map friction and ownership gaps
• Identified duplicated effort, unclear escalation paths, and handoff failures between design and development
• Designed a consolidated team model with defined roles, named leads per product, and a shared quality review process
• Introduced a shared operating cadence — weekly syncs, fortnightly reviews, and a quarterly planning cycle
• Established a quality governance framework with clear criteria for design sign-off

Situation

A digital content organization producing hundreds of pieces per week across multiple channels. AI tools had been introduced piecemeal — individual writers using ChatGPT, some automation in scheduling — but nothing was structurally integrated into the production workflow. The result was tool sprawl, inconsistent quality, and no measurable efficiency gain. Editorial leadership wanted AI to improve speed without compromising voice or standards.

Approach

• Audited the end-to-end editorial workflow from ideation through publication, documenting every stage, role, and decision point
• Identified high-leverage intervention points where AI could meaningfully accelerate work — research, first-draft generation, metadata tagging, and review prioritization
• Redesigned the workflow architecture to place AI at key creation and quality-check stages, with human oversight at editorial decision points
• Defined new roles and handoff points for human-AI collaboration, including a new AI editor function
• Built a phased adoption plan with clear success criteria at each stage

Situation

A digital transformation agency serving enterprise and government clients. The company was losing margin and quality because of a persistent gap between what was scoped and sold in presales and what was actually understood and built in delivery. Assumptions made during proposals were not documented or validated. Context was lost at handoff. Delivery teams regularly discovered mid-project that the scope, constraints, or client expectations were different from what they had received.

Approach

• Interviewed stakeholders across sales, presales, solution architecture, project management, and delivery
• Mapped the full presales-to-delivery flow and identified where assumptions diverged from execution reality
• Redesigned the handoff process with structured documentation templates, shared assumption logs, and explicit accountability checkpoints
• Introduced a joint review gate between presales and delivery before project kick-off — a shared accountability checkpoint that both functions own
• Defined clear escalation paths for when scope or constraints shift post-handoff

Situation

An enterprise technology company with a 15-person design team operating as an internal service desk. Designers received briefs after product and engineering had already made decisions, worked to specifications they had no input on, and were measured on volume of output rather than business impact. The team was skilled but had no voice in prioritization, no executive sponsor, and no governance model connecting design work to business outcomes. Leadership saw design as a cost center. The team saw itself as undervalued. Both were right — the structure made it inevitable.

Approach

• Mapped where design sat in the decision-making process for the company's three largest product lines — and documented every point where decisions were made without design input
• Interviewed the CEO, VP Product, VP Engineering, and design team leads to understand how each function perceived design's role and value
• Built a case for design's strategic potential using the company's own product data — identifying decisions where earlier design involvement would have prevented costly rework or missed market signals
• Proposed a governance model that placed a design lead in product planning alongside product and engineering — not as a reviewer, but as a decision-maker
• Established an executive sponsor for the design function and a quarterly reporting structure that tied design activity to business metrics
• Created a 90-day roadmap for the newly repositioned function to demonstrate measurable strategic value