mTab Design team
Building a collaborative design culture from the ground up
Overview
When I joined Slideworx as Head of Design there was a design team on paper, but it wasn't really working as one. Every designer sat on their own project with no shared process, no design system, no style guide and no planning to speak of. Over a few months I turned that group into an actual team. For the last ten years I've led it through an acquisition, layoffs, and a fundamental shift in how design work gets done.
Nobody could see what anyone else was working on. There were no feedback loops and nothing resembling career development. Most of the designers came from art backgrounds and didn't have the technical grounding to work well with Engineering. Fixing it meant changing both the process and the mindset, so that working together felt like the obvious thing to do, and so designers understood not just how to design something but what it was actually for.
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, and it turned out to be just as good for the team spirit as it was for skills.
As the team's seniority grew and some team members decided to move on, we needed to hire replacements. For young talent recruitment, we partnered with a local Art University professor to organise data visualisation contests for students, offering prize money and paid internships. This became an effective talent pipeline, bringing in candidates already aligned with 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, keeping 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 genuine technical fluency. Designers grew from junior to mid, mid to senior. The collaborative culture survived the acquisition, the layoffs, and every organisational shift.