My journey as a designer has been shaped by a variety of experiences, from working with top sports teams at Kitman Labs to developing healthcare products at IBM. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that leading a design team in the software industry is not just about managing work—it’s about cultivating a culture of clear communication, creativity, collaboration, and a strong focus on impact.
Building a Foundation with Clear Communication and Focus
In my current role at Kitman Labs, where we work with sports leagues and teams such as the NFL and Premier League, the importance of clear communication is paramount. Our products are used by elite professional teams to keep athletes at their peak. Design decisions must be rationalised, communicated and aligned with both user needs and business goals. These decisions have an impact for the user but also the business and the communication of the rationale behind those decisions determines the design teams ability to deliver good product.
Why this matters: The stakes are high when designing tools that impact athlete performance and health. Clear communication ensures that all team members and stakeholders are aligned with the overarching objectives, reducing the risk of misinterpretation and enabling us to deliver product that meets the high expectations of our clients.
I like to strongly focus on making our goals explicit and shared across the team, minimising the risks of assumptions leading to misaligned outputs. Coupling this with regular check-ins allows the team to stay up to date and responsive to any changes or new insights that arise. This approach helps us maintain a collaborative environment where ideas can be shared, tested, refined, and implemented swiftly. A goal oriented approach is very helpful. Agreeing with the team short and long term goals helps us keep focus and concentrated. But, like all plans and goals, we do have to regularly question them so as not to miss an opportunity or misdirect.
Fostering a Collaborative Environment
Collaboration across the squads and disciplines is imperative for building a great experience. The integration of design and development is crucial for creating products that serve the real-world needs of users. This has required me to draw heavily on the “Design Thinking” methodology, which emphasises empathy, ideation, and iterative development. I find this a simple framework, which has its drawbacks, to implement and use as a starting point with the more junior team members. As the designer and engineer levels up, their own sense of process develops, and the aim then becomes about setting basic expectations and principles.
Why this matters: Collaboration between designers, developers, and other stakeholders ensures that the final product is both innovative and technically sound. By fostering an environment where cross-functional collaboration is the norm, we can tackle complex problems from multiple perspectives, leading to more robust and user-centered solutions.
Balancing Creativity with Constraint
One of the key challenges in leading a design team is balancing the creative freedom of designers with the practical constraints of software development cycles. At Kitman Labs, where our timelines are often dictated by the competitive sports seasons, this balance is critical.
Creativity needs structure to be effective, especially when working within the fast-paced environment of software development. With a small team a Kitman Labs, covering multiple products. We have centralised the team and created two approaches to product and innovation work, 1) Full Support and 2) Consultation. We generally push squads to use a consultation when working on simple work, which can be like an assembly line of work. The designer acts as quality assurance and gives advice from afar. The squad uses the design system templates and rules to constrain direction. While a full support model is used for high impact strategically important work. Here the designer has full grace to attack the problem space and work through understanding the context, the user, the stakeholder needs and ideating strongly. These two levels free us up but allow for oversight and a retention of quality.
Managing Remote Teams
Given the global nature of our work, managing remote teams has become a significant part of my role. With a team spread across different time zones, tools like Figma and Slack are essential for maintaining productivity and team cohesion. However, I’ve found that these tools alone are not enough—building a strong team culture, based on interpersonal connections and a common direction is key.
Why this matters: Studies from the Harvard Business Review emphasise that remote teams thrive when they have strong social connections and a shared sense of purpose. To address this, I like to have regular online workshops and informal check-ins, this goes some way to help maintain the team’s morale and foster a sense of belonging, even when we’re miles apart.