How the work is led
What how design was led across the teams and clients in these filesFor panels hiring at lead and staff levelProblem a title says nothing about how the decisions got made
Five product teams build on a system I own. Twenty-nine people in two pods had one designer, for over three years. A trust’s clinicians, teenagers and parents were all asked before anything was drawn. What follows is how that work was led, and where each piece of it can be checked.
One designer and the people each file’s work reached. Run a hand down the rows.
01Scope
Who the work reached, and what was mine
| The work | Who it reached | What I owned |
|---|---|---|
| 001 · OI Design System | Five product teams and nine designers build on it, with the Head of Frontend Engineering’s team writing against it | The system end to end, its memory and the AI prototyping pipeline |
| 002 · Astrato | Twenty-nine people across two delivery pods, as the one designer on both, for over three years | The join canvas and its research, Astrato Insights, the component libraries |
| 003 · Safe Space | Clinicians, young people and parents in 19 interview sessions, 70 survey responses and three co-design workshops; a clinic of 21 people in the beta | The research, the privacy model, the apps and the clinician tool |
| 004 and 005 | Two enterprise clients’ reporting layers, delivered through Astrato’s pods | The design of each, as lead product designer; rebuilt here with fictional data |
| The class | The whole company: engineers, product managers, sales | An interactive class in atomic design, written and taught |
02Decisions
Calls other people had to live with
Leading is mostly deciding in writing, early, and paying for it in public. Each of these is in a case file with what it cost.
- Naming who decides each changeSix named roles and a matrix that resolves eighteen classes of change to the sign-off a pull request cannot merge without. The cost: the system’s writing stopped being mine. 001
- Killing the route already being builtFive prototyping routes compared in a written memo, and the one under construction stopped the day the evidence landed. The memo should have come first, and the file says so. 001
- Reverting my own rule, the same afternoonA gutter mandated across the system, hardened into a rule and a guard, and all three reverted hours later. The log keeps it so nobody repeats it. 001
- Taking a feature out of my own buildPeer messaging was in the build when the teenagers rejected it on privacy grounds. It came out. 003
- Nothing shared without a choice34% of young people would let a parent see their activity, 80% of parents wanted to. Parents get a weekly summary, never the words. 003
- A slower number, on purposeEvery figure on the reporting layer carries the basis it was computed on, which costs every reader a click. That cost is the product. 004
03Two memos
Two decisions, a page each
Written the way a decision goes to people who were not in the room: the situation, the choice, what was decided, what it cost and what happened. Every line is in the case file it links to.
Who sees a teenager’s diary 003
- Situation
- A young people’s mental health service moved home in 2020, and between appointments nobody could see how a teenager was doing.
- The choice
- What parents asked for against what teenagers would allow: 80% of parents wanted to see their child’s activity, 34% of young people would let them, and 88% worried about who could see what they wrote.
- Decided
- Private by default. A young person shares entry by entry and reader by reader; parents get a weekly summary with a trend and never the words.
- What it cost
- The parents who wanted more did not get it. A diary that satisfies the eighty per cent loses the thirty-four, and then has nothing in it to read.
- What happened
- 8 of 8 parents opened every weekly summary; patients wrote 4 entries a week each, unprompted; 94% of beta users said it should continue, a share whose base the report does not give.
One number, or the basis with it 004
- Situation
- A reporting layer over five validated systems that could not be altered, for a company that reports in one currency and earns in others.
- The choice
- One quarter had two honest readings that pointed opposite ways. The spreadsheets were fast because each analyst had chosen the basis privately; a shared screen cannot choose for hundreds of readers.
- Decided
- Every figure carries the basis it was computed on, one act restates the whole screen and its SQL, and an override is never silent.
- What it cost
- A click and a moment of thought for every reader. That cost is the product, not a failure of it.
- What happened
- Held in the rebuild: no figure without its basis. Adoption was not measured, so it is not claimed.
04How design work moves
The same seven steps, in every file
Not a process imposed on a team: the order the work went in, each time, and the section of a case file where it shows.
- Understand the people at every cornerBefore drawing anything. 003, research
- Draw the system before the screensActors, flows and what can fail. 002, blueprint
- Decide in writingA matrix, a memo or a log entry, with what it costs. 001, the decision log
- Build in the real componentsThe thing, not a picture of it. 001, the system running
- Test with five, and report a countWith its interval, never a bare percentage. 002, research
- Measure against targets set beforeMet, held, or not measured and not claimed. 003, outcome
- Write down what I would do differentlyEvery file closes on it. 005, hindsight
05Where it rubbed
Where it rubbed, one per file
| File | Where it rubbed | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 001 | The system was not the hard part; getting engineers to want it was | The rule book and the memory reached them after the library. I would put them first. |
| 002 | The research measured how easy the task was; the business case was the query bill | The bill was never instrumented. I would measure it from the first sprint. |
| 003 | Parents wanted to see what their teenagers would not show them, by forty-six points | A summary for parents, the words for nobody without a choice |
| 004 | One quarter had two honest readings that pointed opposite ways | The screen surfaces the basis instead of choosing one for every reader |
| 005 | The export gate was tracked by people who did not own the spread | A market shutting mid-lot read as a bad week. Find who owns each input first. |
06After launch
What stayed, and what nobody measured
- 001 Nobody waits for a designer to try an idea: a sentence of plain English becomes a prototype in the product’s own components, and a disagreement now cites a rule number.
- 002 Most of what I shipped in three years has been touched by someone else since; the join canvas outlived every dashboard trend it shipped beside.
- 003 94% of beta users said the service should continue; what happened after the beta is not on the record, so it is not on this page.
- 004 and 005 No adoption was recorded, so none is claimed.
07How a change gets in
A system survives its author by saying who decides
The contribution model behind 001, in four lines. The matrix itself, eighteen rows, is in the case file.
- Small changes need nobodyA component owner adds an atom without asking.
- Every class of change names who signs itEighteen classes, six roles. An optional reviewer may be asked and cannot block, because a review that can block is a second owner.
- Only the owner adds an iron ruleAnd that row has no optional review, because a rule anyone can add is not a rule.
- Everything that decides is loggedLocking a pattern, choosing between options, changing a rule; reverts are recorded, and retired rule numbers stay vacant.
08Onboarding
Your first week on the system
Written for this page in the system’s own rules, the way I would brief a designer joining one of the five teams. It is not an excerpt of the internal documents.
- Monday: read the rule book before the libraryNinety-one numbered slots, two of them retired and left vacant. The components make sense once the rules do.
- Tuesday: no hex above the lineRule 4. A colour, a space or a radius is a token or it is a bug, and dark mode is a token swap because of it.
- Wednesday: a brick frames itselfThe canvas never pads. Build one brick and drop it into two templates; it should look right in both.
- Thursday: eight files or no promotionTypes, tokens, styles, stories and the rest. A verifier reads the work cold and cites rule numbers in what it finds.
- Friday: disagree by numberCite the rule, look up why it exists, and either follow it or retire it in the log. Do not work around it.
09Teaching
The fastest way to scale a system is to teach it
I taught the whole company atomic design through an interactive class, engineers, product managers and sales in the same room: six labs where a page is wrecked and rebuilt with tokens, a button is assembled from them, and a page is prompted into being in the system’s own components. The class runs here, as it was taught.
Source notes
- Every line on this page restates something a case file shows, and links to it; the counts are the canon’s, in assets/figures.js.
- No people management is claimed, because the CV claims none. The page is about how the work was led, not who reported to whom.
- The onboarding week is written for this page in the design system’s published rules; it is not an excerpt of the internal documents.