Design Management

Design Team Transformation

Manager of Product Design · Q2 · 2026

One product design team across four areas: digital banking, mobile native features, back office tools, and the Tecton design system.

overview

When I moved into management, I inherited a team doing product design work under a UX Designer title. Neither the title nor the competency framework behind it reflected the job. This project was about closing that gap.

It covered three things: evolving the team's title from UX Designer to Product Designer, rewriting the design competency framework to match what the work actually demands, and building the management infrastructure for a team now spanning digital banking, mobile native features, back office tools, and the Tecton design system.

From UX designer to product designer: a new title, and a competency framework rewritten around the work the team was already doing.

challenge

Q2's designers worked full stack. One designer could take a feature from the first idea through research, UX, and UI, then keep going into production, working with engineering until it shipped.

The title described one stage of that. A title tells partners what to expect from someone, and a competency framework tells designers what growth looks like. Both were describing a smaller job than the one the team did every day.

The work ran from ideation to production. The old title covered one stage of it.

approach

I started outside Q2, benchmarking how other product organizations define the product designer role and its levels. That gave us a reference point instead of a blank page.

Then I built the framework with the team, not for it. Designers helped shape and review the competencies, so the result described work they recognized as their own.

Each level is written as observable behavior: what a designer at that level actually does across the whole arc of the work, not a list of skills. That gives a designer and their manager something concrete to point to.

The title change itself was a partnership. I worked with HR and with product and engineering leadership to make Product Designer the team's official title.

Alongside the framework, I put structure around a team spread across four areas. Every designer had regular 1:1s and a growth plan tied to the new competencies. Critique was shared across areas, so each part of the team saw the others' work. And we set a shared process for how design works with product and engineering.

A growth plan for every designer, critique shared across all four areas, and one way of working with product and engineering.

outcome

Product Designer became the team's official title. Behind it is a competency framework benchmarked against the industry, shaped by the team, and written around what each level looks like in practice.

The title now matches the job: designers who own the work from the first idea to the shipped product.