Innovation Studio

The Story

At Yahoo, I led a team called Ad Innovation. Our charter was to envision the next generation of ad experiences that leveraged the company’s ad tech platforms. We were the group responsible for looking around corners: identifying what advertising could become, not just improving what it already was.

My team had developed a design process to distill salient aspects of our future-looking concepts into tactical product initiatives that could actually scale. But the day-to-day reality was that my designers spent most of their time on tactical ad format design. The gap between our strategic ambition and our daily practice was something I thought about constantly.

Then the pandemic hit, and whatever creative energy we had been sustaining through proximity evaporated. Remote work stripped away the hallway conversations, the whiteboard sketches after lunch, the spontaneous “did you see this?” moments. My team was still producing good work, but the imaginative energy that made our best work possible was fading. I could feel it in design reviews. The ideas were getting incrementally better instead of categorically different.

The Intervention

My response was deceptively simple. I scheduled a weekly 90-minute session called Innovation Studio. Each week, a different team member would curate a topic or activity for the group. The only constraint was that the topic couldn’t be about ads or our immediate product domain. Instead, it had to come from the broader world of design, art, creativity, media, hi-tech, social issues, or even game playing. The objective was to educate, inspire, uplevel, and capture our collective imaginations.

In 2021 alone, the topics our team explored included Computer Vision, Cyberbullying, IDEO’s Design Process, Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles, Metaverse, Neuroscience in Design, NFTs, John Maeda and Computational Design, Dark Patterns, Pandemic Inspired UX, a tour of Immersive Installations, Comparative Study of Chinese and Western UX, Gamification in Design, App Critiques, and more. The breadth was the point. We weren’t trying to become experts in any one area; we were practicing the skill of drawing connections between distant domains.

I deliberately positioned Innovation Studio as essential team time. This wasn’t a casual or volunteer affair, and it wasn’t a lunch-and-learn that people could skip when deadlines pressed. By making it mandatory and protecting the time, I was making a statement about what I believed our team needed to do its best work.

The curator rotation was a deliberate design decision. Each week, a different team member would research, prepare, and present their chosen topic, then facilitate the discussion that followed. This meant every designer on my team was regularly practicing research synthesis, presentation design, public speaking, and facilitation -skills that are crucial for career growth but nearly impossible to develop through project work alone.

After each curator finished presenting, the real work began. The conversation was structured around specific questions: How are we inspired by this? Why does it matter? What are the implications for us as product designers? Are there concepts we can apply to our work? These weren’t polite, surface-level conversations. They were lively and respectful debates where designers challenged each other’s assumptions and built on each other’s insights.

The Impact

The results showed up in two distinct ways. First, in the scope and ambition of the work itself. In the year following Innovation Studio’s introduction, my team became responsible for vision concepting for Yahoo’s emerging products in Connected TV, Digital Out of Home, Live Stream Commerce, Rewarded Subscription Upsells, and XR Accessibility. Every one of these initiatives originated from the cross-domain thinking that Innovation Studio cultivated.

The pipeline from inspiration to product was real and traceable. A session on immersive installations led to CTV concepts, a discussion about social commerce patterns in China informed live stream commerce work, an exploration of accessibility standards in gaming opened the door to XR Accessibility.

Second, the impact showed up in the team’s growth and culture. I observed a blooming team culture in which the designers were more engaged, trusting, and collaborative with one another. They became more confident in experimenting, more willing to express their sentiments openly, and noticeably better public speakers.

More significantly, Innovation Studio became our time for connectedness, which was especially important during the pandemic. When other teams were struggling with remote isolation and Zoom fatigue, my team had a weekly ritual that everyone looked forward to.

The concept proved so durable that I brought Innovation Studio to Splice when I joined as Head of Design. At Splice, it evolved to reflect our creative tools context: topics have ranged from generative AI in creative contexts to competitive audits of tools like Suno Studio to explorations of design principles from adjacent domains. The fact that it transferred successfully across two very different companies is evidence that it’s a structural intervention in how creative teams think and grow, not a gimmick tied to a particular situation.

The Bigger Picture

I close with this case study because it reveals something about my leadership philosophy that shipping a product can’t. Any design manager can point to a successful launch. Very few can articulate how they designed a system that makes their team more creative over time.

Innovation Studio wasn’t a one-off initiative; it was organizational design: the deliberate construction of a process that shapes how people think, collaborate, and grow. For a Head of Design role, this is the most relevant kind of leadership story because the job is fundamentally about creating the conditions under which great design happens at scale.

It’s not about being the best designer in the room; it’s about building an environment where every designer in the room does their best work. Innovation Studio is my proof that I think this way and that I can execute on it. The fact that it’s also the work I’m most proud of tells the interviewer something about my values: I care about the long-term health of the team as much as the short-term quality of the output.