Growth was outpacing leadership readiness. A structured development program built the capability the team needed to scale more resiliently.

The situation

On a distributed state paid leave program, individual contributors were being promoted into lead roles, responsible for planning, cross-disciplinary coordination, stakeholder management, and delivery oversight, without any structured way to prepare them for the transition. There was no shared understanding of what a lead does differently from an IC, no consistent onboarding into lead responsibilities, and no documented way to train someone on the skills they’d need. The gap was showing up in delivery and impacting design team resiliency.

My role

I co-designed and launched a design lead training program, co-facilitated multiple cohorts, and operationalized it for replication.

The approach

A nine-week curriculum covering leadership styles, cross-disciplinary collaboration, scoping and planning, stakeholder management, risk management, and giving feedback. Each cohort was paired with a dedicated mentor. Mentors came with documented expectations, shadowing and reverse-shadowing protocols, and individual training plans co-created with each participant.

Everything was housed in a shared knowledge base with explicit guidance for running the program without its original creators.

Outcomes

The program was adopted by roughly one-third of the design organization and was later adapted into a company-wide lead training program across all practice areas.