Early Lessons in Design Leadership

Introducing prototyping and collaborative design workflows to an organization where design had always happened in isolation, giving teams the ability to participate in design decisions for the first time.

A platform migration created the opportunity to rethink how the organization worked. Experimenting with interactive prototypes, I discovered that design didn't have to happen in isolation — that teams could see, react to, and shape work together before anything was built. That realization changed everything.

  • 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 experience. Nobody could see the whole picture.

The Thinking

The turning point was seeing lo-fi wireframes come to life as interactive prototypes for the first time. Suddenly there was a shared space 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 question 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. For the first time, design was a visible, shared 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.

Outcomes

The processes introduced during this migration didn't end with the project. 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 disconnected, individual 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.

Up Next:

Designing for Experimentation - Built the experimentation foundation that turned behavioral observation into a 30%+ peak-season conversion lift.

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  • Contact:
  • toddunn@gmail.com
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