Management

Building Design Excellence Through People: A Leadership maniphesto

Executive Summary

Throughout my career, I've developed a distinctive approach to design leadership that centers on one core principle: great design teams aren't hired—they're grown. This article examines how I've consistently transformed junior designers into high-performing professionals across multiple organizations, creating sustainable talent pipelines that serve entire companies. Through experiences at Michelin, CN (Canadian National Railway), Orange, Ironhack, and Lifen, I've demonstrated the ability to recruit strategically, mentor effectively, establish quality standards, and navigate complex interpersonal challenges while maintaining team cohesion and performance.

Experience 1: Michelin – Scaling from 2 to 24 Contributors

Context and Challenge

As Platform Expert at Michelin, I managed the deployment of a new website for Michelin passenger car tires across 70 countries and nearly as many languages—all within an aggressive timeline. The project began with a team of two contributors in Paris, which I then scaled to manage 20+ contributors across three continents.

Strategic Approach

Recruitment Philosophy

The technical challenge was significant: we used Day CQ, a Content Management System that later became Adobe Experience Manager, but was relatively unknown in the market at the time. Finding contributors with existing CQ expertise proved nearly impossible.

Rather than limiting ourselves to the small pool of technically qualified candidates, I made a strategic decision: prioritize curiosity and soft skills over existing technical knowledge. I recruited people who could learn, collaborate effectively, and contribute to team cohesion. The first two hires were former colleagues from a similar project (Nissan Europe), providing a foundation of trust and shared methodology.

For the remaining ten Paris-based positions, I reviewed hundreds of CVs and conducted extensive interviews, always asking: Can this person learn quickly? Will they strengthen team dynamics? I also deliberately built gender balance, achieving a team composition of five women and seven men.

Global Team Structure

To ensure 24/7 coverage for both content contribution and debugging, I established:

12 contributors in Paris (directly recruited and managed by me)
6 contributors in Vietnam (via agency partnership)
4 contributors in Bogota (via agency partnership)

This distributed structure required not just management skills, but the ability to create cohesive processes across time zones and cultures.

Training and Standardization

Recognizing that most team members lacked CMS experience, I developed a comprehensive training program:

Created detailed "How-To" guides covering all platform functions
Leveraged the 2 ex-Nissan CMS Managers to provide hands-on training
Established quality standards that reflected Michelin's brand expectations
Implemented consistent review processes to maintain deliverable excellence

Navigating Difficult Situations

Not all challenges were technical. When a female contributor reported inappropriate behavior from a male colleague—including intense staring and inappropriate comments—I acted decisively:

Listened to the person reporting the issue without judgment
Collected other team members observations
Investigated by speaking directly with the accused individual
Acted immediately when he confirmed the behavior, coordinating with HR to ensure he didn't return the next day
Protected the team by ensuring the two individuals didn't cross paths again

This situation reinforced a key leadership principle: when harassment is confirmed, swift action isn't just appropriate—it's essential for team safety and trust.

Results

One of my proudest achievements on this project was maintaining remarkably low turnover despite many contributors being on temporary contracts. Several team members stayed for the entire two-year project duration—a testament to the supportive environment and clear growth opportunities I provided.

Experience 2: CN – Standardizing Design Practice

Context and Challenge

As Lead Product Designer at CN, a Canadian freight and multimodal transportation company based in Montreal, I faced a different challenge: a team of seven designers, each working with their own methodologies, tools, and processes. My role wasn't primarily recruitment—it was creating consistency while respecting individual expertise.

Strategic Approach

Collaborative Standardization

Rather than imposing a top-down methodology, I facilitated a collaborative process:

Discovery workshops: Organized 3 hour workshops where all seven designers shared their pre-CN and current methodologies, tools, and approaches
Pattern identification: Documented commonalities, complementary tools, and practices that had proven most effective
Co-creation: Compiled findings into Confluence pages for team review and validation
Artifact development: asked each designer to created practical templates including: User contact email templates, Stakeholder communication templates, User interview guides, User testing protocols, Contextual inquiry preparation checklists, Field research toolkits.

This approach ensured buy-in because the methodology emerged from the team's collective wisdom rather than my individual preferences.

Skill Development Through Example

Several designers had never conducted user testing or interviews. My approach was always "lead by example":

Work alongside the designer on their first card sort, user test, or interview
Coordinate with my manager (the Design Director) to staff them on projects where they could immediately apply new skills
Provide support as they practiced independently

This built confidence and competence simultaneously.

Visibility and Innovation

My Design Director recognized my pedagogical strengths and positioned me to present our new user research methodology to CN's board of directors. This visibility reflected an understanding of my natural working style—someone who creates new approaches, pioneers methodologies, and connects people to ideas and each other.

Results

The standardization effort created a shared language and toolkit across the design team, accelerating project timelines and improving cross-team collaboration. Designers who had never conducted research became confident practitioners within months.

Experience 3: Orange – Stabilizing a Team in Crisis

Context and Challenge

Orange's customer support experience design team was in distress when I arrived. I was the third Lead Designer in two months; the previous two had each lasted only three weeks before leaving abruptly.

A small team of UX designers and UI designers had been operating without clear leadership for months, receiving ad hoc requests from multiple product managers without prioritization or protection.

Strategic Approach

Assessment and Protection

My first priority was understanding the people I'd inherited:

What were their individual strengths and weaknesses?
What bad habits had formed in the absence of leadership?
What did they need most urgently?

Process Restructuring

I implemented a simple but effective change: all new requests had to come through a public #design-request Slack channel, where Product Managers would post a brief description of their needs.I would review these requests, contact the relevant PM, and prioritize accordingly.

I also instructed the Design team that any informal requests received directly should be logged to the Slack channel by the designers themselves, and to wait for my prioritization before beginning work. This single change provided:

Visibility into request volume and priorities
Protection for designers already committed to deliverables
Accountability for PMs who previously worked in silos
Better coordination between PMs working on the same products

My goal was creating fluidity while establishing healthy boundaries.

Results

In just four months, I stabilized a team that had lost two leaders in as many months. When my mission was done and I was leaving the team in good hands, one of the designers told me she was sad to see me leave because finally, someone had listened to us and protected us.

Experience 4: Ironhack – Training 150 Designers

Context and Challenge

At Ironhack, a startup offering intensive bootcamps, I taught UX/UI design for four years, training approximately 150 designers who now work at companies including Thales, UX Republic, SNCF, Penny Lane, PayFit, Ledger, and Mirakl.

The challenge was transforming complete beginners into job-ready designers in just 10 weeks—teaching not just tools and methodologies, but critical thinking and professional independence.

Strategic Approach

Comprehensive Curriculum

My curriculum covered:

Design thinking methodology
User research tools and techniques
Figma and UI design
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fundamentals (3 days)
Most importantly: critical thinking and independent decision-making

I deliberately avoided creating "cookie-cutter" designers who all worked the same way. Instead, I emphasized understanding the reality of professional practice and making informed, context-appropriate decisions.

Real Projects, Real Clients

Students worked on actual client projects, which inevitably created complex interpersonal situations requiring careful management.

Managing Conflict

Two students were assigned to work together on a two-week client project. One student was particularly challenging: extremely confident, resistant to feedback, poor at communicating with both the client and her partner. During a client meeting, she spoke inappropriately to the client and behaved in a way that made her partner cry.

My response:

Listened the affected student first
Gathered objective perspective from the client, who confirmed the issues but offered to continue with each student working on separate projects
Interviewed the problematic student, who showed no self-reflection and positioned herself as the victim

Understanding her personality pattern, I implemented a protective structure:

Separated the students onto two different projects with the client's permission
Provided much more frequent check-ins with the challenging student
Established clear short-term, medium-term, and long-term objectives
Created additional structure for client communication

The situation reinforced the importance of adapting management style to individual needs while protecting team dynamics.

Teacher Assistant Development

As a teacher, I was assisted by three Teacher Assistants (TAs)—junior designers or recent bootcamp graduates I personally recruited. While most Ironhack TAs stayed only 3-6 months, mine often stayed nearly two years, with several becoming instructors themselves.

My retention secret was treating the bootcamp itself as a product and my TAs as designers iterating on it every three months:

Progressive Responsibility Model:

Bootcamp 1: Teach one course of their choice
Bootcamp 2: Teach one course outside of their confort zone
Bootcamp 3: Teach all courses in one unit (e.g., all user research courses, or all Figma workshops)
Bootcamp 4: Create entirely new lesson content and teach it

Learning from Mistakes

I once recruited a TA with strong presentation skills and a front-end development background, assuming she could immediately help teach the three-day front-end module (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). I asked her to handle the JavaScript day—the area I was least comfortable with—giving her seven weeks to prepare for teaching existing content.

Despite having clear objectives and existing materials, she was in a state of constant panic and couldn't make progress. I realized I had failed to provide adequate scaffolding. The problem wasn't her capability or the timeline—it was my assumption that preparation time alone would be sufficient support.

I removed the teaching responsibility and repositioned her as my assistant for that day instead. But the funny thing is, the moment that pressure lifted, she relaxed and without any prompting from me, she naturally stepped up and took the lead on teaching that day.

Results

Training 150 designers in four years demonstrated my ability to accelerate learning dramatically. More importantly, my TAs' longevity and career progression (several becoming instructors) proved that my development approach created genuine growth opportunities.

Experience 5: Lifen — Protecting Designers from Top Management

Context and Challenge

Working in a startup often means top management is deeply involved in product creation. It is not unusual for a CEO or executive to send ad hoc requests directly to designers, sometimes with very short deadlines and at inconvenient hours. Junior designers, eager to help, may struggle to say no—leading to untracked overtime that erodes work–life balance.

Strategic Approach

My responsibility was clear: protect my designers while still meeting the company’s strategic needs. I implemented pragmatic, concrete measures:

Gatekeeping critical requests
All urgent or operational requests had to go through me (or a designated channel) to assess priority, scope, and feasibility before assignment. This applied also to leadership; it prevented unscoped requests from landing directly on a designer’s plate.

Individual protection and compensation
When a designer accepted a validated urgent task, I ensured compensation was planned: recovery day(s), schedule adjustments, or additional support.

Direct, constructive dialogue with leadership
When repeated patterns appeared, I addressed them openly with executives: I explained the impact on quality, retention, and wellbeing, and proposed operational fixes.

Coaching juniors on professional refusal
I trained designers—especially juniors—to prioritize and say no professionally: response scripts, proposed alternatives, and clear escalation paths.

Results

Zero unscoped ad hoc requests reaching designers directly in the past 12 months.
Improved wellbeing (reduced invisible overtime, more recovery days taken).
Stronger relationship with leadership: simple, agreed rules replaced problematic ad hoc behaviors.
Designers—including juniors—gained confidence and autonomy in negotiating scope and priorities.

In short, in a startup where leadership is highly involved, protecting the team does not mean blocking initiatives—it means establishing pragmatic guardrails—processes, compensation, and open dialogue—that let the company move fast without burning out its talent.

Key Leadership Principles

Across these experiences, several consistent principles emerge:

1. Prioritize Potential Over Credentials

At Michelin, recruiting for curiosity and soft skills over technical expertise built a stronger, more adaptable team than limiting ourselves to the small pool of already-qualified candidates.

2. Lead by Example

At CN, I never asked designers to try research methods I hadn't first demonstrated with them. This "show, then support" approach builds confidence and competence simultaneously.

3. Protect Your Team

At both Orange and Lifen, simply establishing that requests must come through proper channels gave designers the breathing room to do quality work. Protection isn't about isolation—it's about creating sustainable workloads.

4. Act Decisively on Misconduct

At both Michelin and Ironhack, when harassment or unprofessional behavior was confirmed, I acted immediately to protect team members. Hesitation in these situations destroys trust.

5. Standardize Collaboratively

At CN, involving the entire team in methodology development created buy-in and leveraged collective expertise. Standards imposed from above rarely stick; standards built together become team culture.

6. Create Progressive Growth Opportunities

At Ironhack, giving TAs increasingly complex teaching responsibilities over multiple bootcamps created a clear growth path that retained talent and built genuine capability.

7. Understanding Individual Motivations

Throuhout all my experiences, I tried to understand what motivates each person on my team, because each individual has different drivers:

Sophie at Lifen is motivated by recognition of work accomplished
Maya at Ironhack thrives when given freedom to express creativity
Clarice at Orange values stability and protection from pressure

8. Establish Rituals That Reinforce Culture

Regular one-on-ones, design critiques, and cross-team rituals are the mechanisms through which standards, support, and shared learning happen.

Conclusion

The common thread is simple: I don't just manage designers—I grow them. Whether scaling from 2 to 24 contributors, standardizing practices, stabilizing a team in crisis, training 150 designers, or building rituals that sustain excellence, my approach consistently transforms potential into performance.