Building a design team isn't about drawing an org chart; it's about navigating the inevitable arguments over process, principles, and who gets the final say. This is the story of how I turned chaos into a high-performing team.

Every big company is secretly run by a monstrous spreadsheet. This one was costing a fortune and causing chaos. My job wasn't just to build a new feature; it was to find that spreadsheet and kill it for good.

How do you take a company that makes lumps of metal and drag it into the modern, digital age? It's a decade-long story of connecting hardware to software, building a digital ecosystem from scratch, and changing the very DNA of a company.

When I walked into the project, it was a fire on three fronts. The product was a tangled mess, and the team's feedback process resembled a riot in a phone box. This is the story of how I diagnosed the real problem: you can't fix a broken product until you fix the chaotic conversation that's building it. It's a case study in leadership without authority, and how architecting a moment of calm is the…