mTab Design team

Overview

I joined Slideworx as Head of Design ten years ago and have led its design team ever since, through an acquisition, layoffs and a fundamental shift in how design work gets done. Since COVID, the team has worked mostly remotely.

Challenge

What I inherited was a design team on paper: designers working alone on their own projects, with no shared process, design system, style guide or planning. Nobody could see what anyone else was doing, and there were no feedback loops or career development.

Most of the designers came from art backgrounds and lacked the technical grounding to work well with Engineering.

The goal went beyond the team: improve the UX of the whole platform, raise awareness of design across the company, and modernise how the product looked and behaved. That meant changing the process and the mindset, so working together felt obvious and designers understood what they were designing for, as well as how.

My role

I brought in design reviews, critique sessions, 1-on-1s built around career growth, and workshops. My developer background helped here. I could sit between Design and Engineering, and over time I got the team comfortable enough with technical constraints that developers started taking design seriously.

A big part of my job has been shaping the team's future and making sure everyone on it keeps evolving. I made sure the team had access to learning, and we went to design conferences together. That kept fresh ideas coming into our work.

As the team grew more senior and some people moved on, we needed new hires. To find young talent, we partnered with a professor at a local art university on data visualisation contests for students, with prize money and paid internships. It became an effective pipeline of candidates who already knew our domain.

I've always been involved in shaping who's on the team: hiring, letting people go when it came to that, and stepping up as a product leader through two rounds of layoffs. The hardest stretch was mTab's acquisition of Slideworx in 2019, and the changes in leadership that followed. My job was to keep everyone steady and still working together while nobody knew what was coming.

Outcome

The fractured group I inherited became a tight team with a strong culture and the technical fluency to work well with Engineering. Designers grew from junior to mid, and mid to senior, and that culture held through the acquisition and two rounds of layoffs.