Design Craft

A curriculum, a library, a strategy, and an instrument

Design Craft started as a phrase leadership used and nobody could point at. By the time I left it had 4 working parts, each one feeding the next.

1. A workshop curriculum built by the people who'd teach it

I assembled a group of designers and design managers to build the curriculum with me. None of them reported to me—I ran the meetings, set the schedule, and made the final calls on scope. The only leverage I had was that the work was worth their time. Four workshops came out of it, delivered across 5 sessions because one of them needed a part 2, covering structured ideation, reframing and creative confidence, prototyping, content design, and critique. Designers were the priority, and we opened individual workshops up to PMs when the skill called for it.

2. A method library that outlived the sessions

Every method we workshopped got written up and published into the product handbook as standing practice, so a designer who missed a session—or joined a year later—could still use it. Each entry documents what the method is, when to use it, when not to use it, who needs to be in the room, and the steps.

3. A strategy with 2 bets and 2 mechanisms

Halfway through, "run good workshops" stopped being a sufficient plan. I wrote a full strategy for the rest of FY26 and into FY27, structured as 2 bets on the gaps we'd actually documented, plus 2 mechanisms to keep the whole thing from going stale.

4. A maturity assessment

The org had an individual skills framework and no way to talk about a team's craft. I built a team-level instrument calibrated to that framework, scoped to the design team, with designers self-rating and managers rating independently across the craft families. Discovery had given me qualitative signal about what designers needed. The assessment was the next step: quantitative data that could locate craft gaps precisely and prioritize where the program invested next.

I asked 9 designers what was actually wrong

With my staff design partner, I ran discovery interviews with 9 designers across the org, then synthesized them on a shared board. Three themes held across almost every conversation: there was no standardized design process, so teams got inconsistent outcomes; PM partners frequently arrived with the solution already chosen; and creative exploration was the first thing cut whenever a deadline moved.

That synthesis is where the 2 bets came from, and it's why I could write a strategy in the language of documented gaps rather than assumptions. When leadership asked why these 2 priorities, the answer was a list of quotes, not a hunch.

I also looked outward—how other design organizations handle critique cadence, problem validation before build, low-stakes creative practice, and published quality standards—to check whether what we were proposing was table stakes or genuinely differentiated.

Nine conversations beat one confident assumption.

On the delivery side, the constraint that shaped everything was that I had no authority over anyone doing the work. The curriculum group were peers. The facilitators were volunteers with day jobs. So the program had to be built out of things that made participation easy: a clear schedule set far enough ahead to protect, a documented template so nobody built a workshop from scratch, and a published home for the output so contributors' work stayed visible after the session ended.

Craft was being treated as a personal responsibility. It's a structural one.

The pattern underneath all 9 interviews was the same: everything about a designer's growth depended on which manager they happened to have. Some designers got structured feedback and protected exploration time; others got neither, and both groups assumed their experience was normal.

A program is what turns that from a matter of luck into a matter of design. Not because a workshop is transformative on its own—most aren't—but because a published method, a shared vocabulary, and a documented assessment give an organization something to argue about. Before Design Craft, "our design quality is inconsistent" was an opinion. After it, it was a measurable claim with named gaps attached.

That's also why I put so much weight on the handbook documentation. Workshops decay. Attendance numbers are a proxy for reach, not for change. Something a designer can open 18 months later, alone, at the moment they actually need it—that's the part that compounds.

The methods got published. The assessment was mid-flight.

Four workshops ran across 5 sessions, reaching 109 attendances across the product org, with 4 of 5 sessions drawing 20 or more people and average satisfaction at 89%. The methods from those sessions were written up and published into the product handbook, where they became standing documented practice available to every designer and PM—the outcome I'd care about most, because it's the one that doesn't depend on me being in the building.

The strategy was written, socialized, and approved as the plan for the remainder of the fiscal year and into the next one.

What I'd take to the next org is less the artifacts than the sequence: interview before proposing, build the curriculum with the people who'll teach it, publish everything into a durable home, and put an instrument in place early enough that you can actually read it later.