ICEO is a venture builder operating in the fintech ecosystem, with five ventures under its umbrella. The company experienced rapid growth, expanding from 38 to 180 employees in just 1.5 years. Despite this expansion, design remained a fragmented function.
When I joined as Head of Design, the team consisted of three siloed designers working independently under different CEOs and product managers, without shared processes, rituals, or career frameworks.
Design was primarily seen as an executional function rather than a strategic contributor.
My main challenge was to transition design from a fragmented, execution-driven function into a scalable, collaborative, and strategic discipline that contributes to business outcomes across ICEO’s ventures. Key challenges and objectives included:
Lack of a structured design processes or rituals - Improve time to deliver
Lack of career frameworks or role expectations - Decrease time spent on alignment
Designers being micromanaged and used as execution resources - Increase time spent on discovery
Limited understanding of design’s strategic role - Increased involvement in epic creation
Minimal collaboration between designers and stakeholders - Increase amount of design thinking sessions
Understand
We performed research on the topic of design team scaling, combining desk research with stakeholder interviews to discover pains and needs. We utilized existing frameworks like the Design Leadership Framework and insights from the book "Design Leadership Ignited" and conduct an in-depth analysis of the design team and ICEO’s broader structure.
Prioritize insights
The insights from this analysis have been shared with our key stakeholders, and together we prioritized which topics to pick up first through a simple impact/effort exercise - relating all topics to business value on the impact axis and feasibility on the effort axis
Plan
We then got a view of the maturity of design within the organization and build a structured roadmap for scaling the design discipline effectively. As this is far from a liniear exercise, we focussed on creating organizational structure & team composition first, before scaling up our hiring.
Execute
By involving main stakeholders in collaborative workshops - ranging from HR, Heads, Founders, Product and Growth departments - we established several frameworks and processes that have set a proper foundation for design to scale.
Note: I tried to condense as much information as I can. Each of these topics deserve to be presented in separate case studies due to many learnings and effort performed.
Our objective was to create alignment and improve speed of delivery. Focus has been put on a couple of topics, emphasizing foundational work for operations & team work, establishing a design culture.
What we have achieved:
Building team rituals & culture
Introduced alignment meetings, critique sessions, and a Confluence knowledge hub to increase visibility, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Hiring & team growth
Focused on T-shaped, startup-ready designers with stakeholder management skills, while creating a standardizes career framework to create clear role expectations for hiring and promotions .
Defining scalable processes
Created a visualized design process to clarify roles, workflow, and time allocation while also making design embedded in product strategy and discovery.
Improving collaboration
Standardized feedback loops, introduced design thinking workshops to increase stakeholder involvement and cross functional collaboration and involved designers in planning
CEO alignment & leadership buy-in
Used data and process visuals to showcase design’s strategic impact, and defined structured feedback loops, reducing ad-hoc interruptions
Design Critiques & Feedback
+400%
Design Epic Delivery Times
-30%
Team Satisfaction - Likert Scale
4 → 6
Team Growth
3 → 9
In Conclusion