Built CME's design unit from the ground up

The bet

When I joined CME, design sat where it sits in most services firms: at the end of the line, brought in to make a finished build look finished. No team, no process, no real say.

My bet was that design didn't belong at the end of the line at all. In a services firm, it could be a service of its own, something a client pays for, comes back for, and pays to expand. Done right, it wouldn't just improve the work. It would grow the business.

I didn't pitch the idea and wait for approval. I proved it on live client work, and management came to me about forming a unit about two days before I planned to go to them.

The approval followed the evidence, not the other way around.

The real test came later, when a client wanted the design work on its own, separate from what first brought us in. They wanted it for its own sake. That settled it.

What fought back

Management backed the team early, so I was never fighting to exist. The harder fight was status.

CME was built on engineering, and for a while design sat a step below it. We were welcome, but not yet part of the decisions that shaped the business.

That changed with proof, not persuasion. Once leadership saw what design did for the client work, they pulled us into sales and discovery earlier. I started pitching new clients myself, with proof-of-concept work instead of promises. SNB was one of them.

Developers were the other front. Being asked to work design-driven felt like friction at first. It changed one project at a time, as they saw work that was high quality and well documented and started to expect it. A few of them began pushing for design inside their own teams.

I didn't win everyone over. But enough of the team came around that design stopped being something I had to defend, and became something the company expected.

The moves

Three decisions did most of the work.

• Hired for adaptability, not just craft. In a services firm, a designer often lands on an unfamiliar client and has to work alone from day one. Craft was a given. What I looked hardest for was the ability to learn a new business fast and get moving without much help. A perfect brief almost never arrived, so I valued people who didn't need one.
• Built the structure before anyone asked. A real career path, clear levels to grow through, and a simple way to track where each designer was strong or still needed work. None of it was billable, but it gave a team spread across many clients a clear map. When someone didn't know what to do next, the answer was already written down.
• Measured how the company saw design, then acted on it. Instead of guessing at design's reputation, I surveyed the whole company. Then I ran a workshop based on what came back: Design and Dev, a collaborative story, two sessions, 83 colleagues, rated 4.45 out of 5. I made sure PMs and POs were in the room, not just designers, because they decide how design fits into a project.

What it produced

The bet paid off in ways I could measure.

• Three new clients from five pitches, in one year. We pitched proof-of-concept work to potential clients, and three of the five signed.
• A 116-person survey on how the company saw design. Nearly three quarters understood the reasoning and process behind it. People who worked with designers rated that work 4.2 out of 5.

Design stopped being the thing that polished a deal someone else closed. It became the reason a client said yes.

The survey also showed where design fell short. The lowest scores came from one team, where too few designers were stretched across too many people. So we added a designer to share the load.

By the end, the unit had a real structure of its own: a career path, the start of DesignOps, and shared design systems behind our biggest projects. Designers even helped each other across teams without being asked. The processes we built still run today.

What I'd do differently

If I started over, I'd run the survey on day one.

For the first couple of years, I built the team by reacting. I would hit resistance, work out where it came from, and push through it. It worked, but I was working blind.

When I finally surveyed the company, the answers were so useful that the only question left was why I hadn't done it sooner.

It's the same kind of discovery I'd run for any product before designing it. I just didn't think to point it at the company I was building inside. Now it's the first thing I'd reach for, anywhere I do this again.