Design Thinking at Scale
From Bottleneck to Self-Sufficient Teams
Role: Director of Product Design
Partners: Product Management, Engineering, Product Design Team
Impact: Scaled workshop facilitation from 3 people to 18+ across design and product
The Problem
As a few designers started running design thinking workshops, word spread. Teams saw better alignment and faster decisions, and everyone wanted one. But only 3 designers could facilitate effectively, so teams waited weeks or months for capacity. By the time a designer was free, the moment had passed. I started building resources to upskill designers, then realized the better move was to teach the whole product org. If PMs and engineers could facilitate too, every portfolio could be self-sufficient.
How I Approached It
I created the Design Thinking Toolkit — a practical resource for anyone in the product org to plan and run workshops. A Field Guide covering what design thinking is, when to use it, and how to facilitate. Ready-to-use Miro templates for common scenarios: problem framing, ideation, prioritization, journey mapping. And a decision flow to help teams pick the right workshop for their situation. The key was practical over theoretical: “if you’re solving X, run this workshop, here’s the template.”
What Changed
We went from 3 designers facilitating to 18+ people across the org (12+ designers, 6+ product managers). Every portfolio had someone who could run workshops without outside help. Teams stopped waiting for design capacity and gained alignment faster. Design Thinking as a Practice even became a highlight at an Executive Board Meeting — a sign the product org was maturing in how it approached problems.
What I Learned
Capability scales faster than capacity, teaching the org to facilitate beat hiring for it. And democratizing a skill doesn’t diminish it: teams valued design thinking more once they understood it, and called on designers for the harder challenges.