Team Scaling & Design Operations

The Story

When I joined Splice in September 2022, the Product Design team was in fragile condition. There were four designers, and they’d been without a design manager for three quarters. The team was talented but they felt rudderless. Prioritization was unclear. The team didn’t feel included in product decisions. Key relationships with cross-functional partners were strained. And attrition was already in motion.

My charter was clear but enormous: make Product Design feel and operate like a team again, and then scale it to match the ambition of Splice’s product roadmap. Over the next three-plus years, I grew the organization from that fragile starting point to 12+ designers and researchers, recruiting senior talent from Output, Native Instruments, Focusrite, YouTube, and Sonos. But the hiring numbers don’t tell the real story. What I actually built was the cultural and operational infrastructure that makes a design organization effective.

Rebuilding the Foundation

My first priority was establishing trust and psychological safety. Before I could recruit, before I could set design direction, I needed the existing team to feel secure enough to do their best work. I assessed the health of every cross-functional partnership and identified where communication gaps were causing friction.

I established a weekly design crit (which I named “design shares”) that became the backbone of our design culture. I deliberately shaped the review culture to be the opposite of anxiety-inducing, performative affairs: a safe space for showing messy work, asking hard questions, and thinking together. We almost always fill the allotted time, and it’s become a time the team genuinely looks forward to.

Within months, I observed a measurable shift. The team culture transformed from apprehension and pensiveness to what I can only describe as hope and excitement. Designers became more engaged, more trusting, more collaborative with one another.

Hiring as Organizational Design

Scaling a design team isn’t just filling headcount; it’s organizational design. Every hire shapes the team’s culture, its creative range, and its ability to influence the product. I approached hiring with three consistent principles: exceptional product design fundamentals, a strong orientation toward innovation, and significant growth potential.

The most consequential single hire was a Principal Designer whose storytelling and brand background brought a Creative Director-level presence that the team had lacked. Another designer was hand-recruited from iZotope for our early AI enablement work. Each hire solved a specific organizational need while adding to the team’s collective creative range.

From a recruiting standpoint, I attracted top-tier talent by demonstrating design thought leadership and building Splice Design’s reputation on LinkedIn. When designers at Output, Native Instruments, Focusrite, YouTube, and Sonos chose to join Splice, they were joining a team and a leader, not just a company.

As a former software developer who got into design as a code prototyper, I was especially drawn to hiring technical designers. Several of the designers I brought on were responsible for coding audio interactive prototypes that simply could not be achieved with Figma alone. This hiring philosophy has only become more relevant as we move into agentic software development for agentic products.

Design Operations as Leadership Infrastructure

• Continuous discovery through UXR. I formalized UX Research as part of everyday product development. I secured and deployed UserTesting.com, giving designers and PMs access to continuous user feedback. This fundamentally changed how the team made design decisions.
• Design Shares via Loom. Weekly asynchronous design updates via Loom recordings created cross-organizational visibility into design work without adding meeting overhead.
• Design excellence rubric. A framework for evaluating design quality that gave the team a shared vocabulary for what “good” looks like and provided structure for career development conversations.
• Hands-on creative direction. Even as the team scaled, I continued to workshop designs with every designer, maintaining a consistent quality bar while coaching in real time.

Leading Beyond Design

A Head of Design’s influence doesn’t stop at the boundaries of the design team. At Splice, I stepped into broader product leadership wherever clarity or ownership was missing. I mentored early-career PMs, advocated for more flexible engineering partnerships, and worked with Brand Creative and Marketing to improve alignment on how Splice’s visual identity translated into product experiences.

I also brought something to Splice that no other leader in the organization could: deep, authentic domain expertise as a music producer. I actively use DAWs, produce music, conduct competitive audits of creative tools, and experiment with generative AI in creative contexts. This hands-on practice informs every design decision and gives me credibility with both the creative community and the engineering teams building the tools.

The Bigger Picture

Organizational building is the work that separates a Head of Design from a design manager. Any experienced design manager can lead a team through a product sprint. Very few can take a demoralized team of four, rebuild its culture, scale it to twelve, establish design operations, and create the conditions under which great work happens consistently.

This story answers the question every hiring manager has for a Head of Design candidate: “If we hire this person, what will our design organization look like in three years?” My answer isn’t theoretical. I’ve done it. I’ve built the team, established the culture, created the operating rhythms, attracted the talent, and raised the quality bar. The Splice design organization is my proof of concept.