Early Lessons in Design Leadership

Building structured collaboration, prototyping workflows, and design systems for a growing organization years before they became industry standard.

In 2017, structured prototyping, design systems, and collaborative design workflows weren't yet standard practice. We built them anyway. When Pajamagram and two sister brands migrated from Microsoft Commerce Server to Magento, I used the opportunity to introduce the processes and systems that would define how the organization designed for years to come.

  • Role:
  • Web Designer
  • Scope:
  • Prototyping workflows, design systems, cross-functional collaboration

The Problem: Designing in the Dark

The biggest gap wasn't a tool or a process, it was visibility. Without shared standards, a common design language, or any way to prototype and preview work in context, teams were making decisions in isolation. Design, merchandising, and marketing each had their own version of the product. Nobody could see the whole picture, and that needed to change.

The Thinking

The turning point was seeing lo-fi wireframes come to life in InVision for the first time. Suddenly there was a shared space — a place where the whole team could see exactly what we were designing, interact with it, and respond to it in real time. Comments, approvals, copy tweaks, all in one place. What had previously taken days of back-and-forth could now happen in a single session. The potential was immediate and obvious. The question became: how do we build this into how we work permanently?

That realization drove everything that followed — building the workflows, the standards, and the systems that would give the entire organization visibility into the design process for the first time.

The Solution

I introduced wireframing and interactive prototyping into the design workflow, starting with lo-fi concepts and building through to fully interactive hi-fi prototypes that the entire team could review, comment on, and approve in real time. For the first time, design wasn't something that happened in isolation and then got handed off. It was a shared, visible process.

Alongside that, I built the organization's first digital brand style guide, establishing the shared visual language that had been missing. Together, these practices gave teams a common foundation: a single source of truth for how the brand looked, felt, and functioned across every digital touchpoint. What had previously taken days of fragmented back-and-forth could now happen in a single collaborative session.

Outcomes

The processes introduced during this migration didn't end with the agency engagement, they became the foundation for how the organization designed going forward.

  • Teams could collaborate and review work in real time for the first time
  • A shared visual language replaced inconsistent, fragmented design decisions
  • The brand style guide established standards that persisted across future platform migrations
  • Wireframing and prototyping workflows became standard internal practice

Reflection

This project changed how I thought about design collaboration. Building a process where teams could move from fragmented, isolated decisions to real-time shared visibility, working out concepts and direction together before finalizing, made it clear that the process matters as much as the output. When teams can see, respond to, and align around work early, the final design is almost always better for it.

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  • Contact:
  • toddunn@gmail.com
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