The portfolio shows the screens that shipped. This is the story underneath: how I rebuilt the team so the screens could ship at all.
I joined as Senior Product Design Team Lead in September 2024, on the highest-conversion surface in the company — onboarding, pricing, activation. The team was 8 designers, structured into two silos: 4 product designers, 4 web designers. Smart people. Junior on the average. No design critique rhythm. No standing time with growth analytics. Design shipped at the end of the conveyor belt, not at the front.
The mandate from leadership was a number. Lift conversion. Don't tell us how.
I own the team, the craft bar, the conversion outcome, and the relationship with product and growth. I don't own the funnel analytics, but I sit in the room when targets are set. I don't own engineering, but I co-author the surface roadmap with PM.
The thing I don't try to own: every screen. The fastest way to kill the 3× was to bottleneck on me.
The bet was that the lift wouldn't come from one redesign. It would come from the compound output of a team that knew what to ship and why. So instead of starting with a redesign, I started with the team's shape, the rituals, and the partnerships.
Less obvious version of the same bet: raising conversion is a leadership problem, not a craft problem. The craft is the prerequisite. Leadership is what makes it land.
The team was split by craft skill. I split it by user journey instead — one designer per surface (onboarding, pricing, activation, retention), with web and product collapsed inside the same scope. Designers stopped handing off to each other and started owning the user from first touch to first paid action. Critique conversations changed in a week.
The team had no critique cadence. I set up weekly critique, but with one rule: you present with your PM and your growth analyst. The first three weeks were uncomfortable. By week four, designers were leading hypothesis conversations, not defending their pixels.
Not three. One. The right one. The bar in a team of eight resets the moment a peer designer ships something the rest of the team realizes they couldn't have made alone. The hire mattered more than any redesign.
Built the first AI agents inside the team's daily flow — research synthesis, content variants, prototype generation. Not "explore AI." Embedded into the actual sprint. This is also where the path on the right of this page starts — you'll see the rest there.
3× lift in conversion and activation over the next two quarters, through a sustained experimentation program. Pricing and onboarding both shipped end-to-end redesigns. The Copilot launch (on the portfolio) was the first AI surface the team owned end-to-end.
The outcome I'm prouder of: a senior designer joined the team and named the shift unprompted — "critique here is different from anywhere I've worked. We talk about whether it works, not whether it's pretty." That's the real lift.
I underweighted individual mentorship in month two. I was so focused on team rituals and the surface-pod restructure that two of my designers went a full month without a real 1:1. One of them told me directly. I course-corrected to weekly 1:1s by month three, but I should've had them on day one.
The principle I now apply: team rituals don't replace individual attention. They sit on top of it.