Growing People

For the last two years I owned the entire client product — both B2C and B2B — with a team of 7 designers. In that time, three grew into seniors. One of them, right as I was leaving the company, grew into a lead.

Developing people usually gets reduced to process: reviews, growth frameworks, feedback cycles. That matters, but it’s only the tooling.

Growth happens when you give someone a task bigger and harder than they’re used to, and add whatever they’re missing to carry it. For one person that’s freedom and trust — you just step back. For another it’s the opposite: you stay close until they believe they can do it themselves.

She came to me from another lead, with a working style built entirely on sign-off. Every decision needed approval. Every screen came back with "let’s iterate some more." She and her previous lead had wound themselves into revision loops where neither of them could say anymore what "good" looked like.

For a while I just watched her. Her approach, her systematic thinking, the sharp, fresh solutions she came up with. She didn’t need more feedback. She needed someone to trust her and give her room. So I did. I gave her ambitious tasks and stayed out of the process.

The biggest bet was the storefront redesign — the thing I’d been working toward my whole time at the company: rethink the client product and make it what I believed it should be. I handed the project to her. I just watched and steered; she ran the process with the designers and engineers and did a lot of the hands-on work herself.

The risk wasn’t only hers. If it failed, I’d bury something I’d been building toward for years. The business would get a failed launch with red A/B numbers. And the team, who’d gotten genuinely excited about the redesign, would be disappointed too.

If it failed, I’d bury something
I’d been building toward for years

But it worked. She opened up completely. You could see it in her energy, in the work, in the fact that she started seeing what only I used to see — and acting on it without asking. The result was strong, something the whole design team was genuinely proud of, and she grew into a senior.

In systematic thinking, she’s stronger than me now, and I say that as a compliment to both of us. I recommended her for a lead role and spent the whole last year preparing her for it.

The second designer is the opposite type. Where she’s fire, he’s a quiet architect. Precise, considered, slow in the good way.

One of the most talented designers I’ve worked with. Mid-task, he asks questions that would never have occurred to me. His solutions are solid, well-reasoned, and built with real attention to detail.

The problem isn’t the work. The problem is that he didn’t believe in it.

He could produce three or four strong solutions to one task and never pick any of them — always second-guessing, never sure.

With her I stepped back, because that’s what she needed. With him it was the reverse: step back, and he’d be alone with his doubt. So I leaned in instead — not to double-check him, but so he could see for himself that he was right. I went through decisions with him one on one, sent him to defend his work in front of PMs. Alongside that, I started expanding his scope — handing him, for example, the recurring discovery sessions with the research team.

The real risk wasn’t that he’d fail the task. It was that the new responsibility would land on top of his doubt and just burn him out. But he handled it well, and started opening up even more.

He went further on his own, without any nudge from me. When the designer who owned our design system left, we couldn’t find a replacement fast enough. He volunteered to take over the role himself — not drawing components, but running the process: collecting fixes, managing work between designers and engineers. When he messaged me offering to pick up the design system, I remember thinking: "Oh, it worked."

He made senior recently.