A Quick Overview
As our product ecosystem expanded across three distinct products, the design team grew to more than forty designers distributed in dozens of squads.
While this growth accelerated delivery, it also introduced a new operational challenge: ensuring consistent quality across multiple teams, varying levels of design maturity, and a high volume of parallel decisions.
Design outcomes were strong in isolated areas, but uneven across the organization. To scale design excellence, we needed a unified system that clarified expectations, guided collaboration, and brought coherence to the entire platform experience.
What I did
Define and operationalize a repeatable quality workflow that supported exploration, critique, and validation.
Co-create rituals that balanced autonomy with alignment.
Make this process simple enough to be adopted by dozens of designers—every week.
Approach
Design Jam
A collaborative session for exploration—ideal for when teams needed to unlock thinking, generate alternatives, or quickly build conceptual clarity. Designers, PMs, and engineers co-created early solutions, building shared understanding before decisions were made.Design Critique
A structured space to elevate the craft of an existing solution.
Here, we examined usability, interaction patterns, copy clarity, and visual consistency, refining the work with specialist perspectives and clear rationale.Design Review (Mandatory)
The final checkpoint before development.
The review evaluated whether the solution solved the user problem, fit into the broader product architecture, adhered to principles and heuristics, and avoided fragmented decision-making.
This ceremony became essential in protecting design intent all the way into delivery.
Automating for Scale
To operationalize these rituals across a 40-designer organization, we introduced automation to remove friction and ensure adoption.
Slack Bot Integration
We built a bot that allowed designers to schedule any ceremony—/designjam, /designcritique, /designreview—directly in Slack.
Gemini Gems for Quality
We created a set of Gemini Gems containing our design principles, heuristics, quality attributes, tone of voice guidelines, and copy standards.
This gave designers immediate access to trusted references during exploration and critique, standardizing decision-making even in fast-paced environments.
Results
What began as an initiative to bring clarity became a foundational system for design quality across the organization.
Consistency across product lines improved dramatically
Teams reduced rework by catching issues before handoff
Craft and rigor increased across flows, patterns, and copy
Collaboration between design, product, and engineering strengthened
Designers felt more supported and more confident in their decisions
