How to balance deep domain focus with a cohesive design culture

Article Summary: This article breaks down the "Hybrid Chapter Model," a pragmatic structure I architected and implemented at 90POE to solve the classic "hermit vs. ivory tower" problem. It explains how to give designers deep domain focus while simultaneously building a strong, unified culture that protects craft and career growth.

The false choice: Lone operative vs. ivory towers

There is a tedious and seemingly endless civil war being fought in the world of design leadership. It’s a battle over where designers should live.

In one camp, you have the "Embedded" purists. You take your designer, plant them in a cross-functional product squad, and tell them to get on with it. The theory is that this gives them deep focus and makes them a "true" member of the team. The reality is that you’ve often created a "lone operative," a design hermit, cut off from their peers. They slowly forget their craft, their standards slip, and their professional development grinds to a halt.

In the other, you have the "Centralised" traditionalists. This is the old-school "internal agency" or "ivory tower." A group of designers sits together in a separate team, waiting for "briefs" to be thrown over the wall. The work they produce is often beautiful, consistent, and completely disconnected from the messy reality of engineering constraints and business needs. They are seen as an external service, not a partner.

Faced with this false choice between a lonely hermit and an out-of-touch artist, most companies just pick one and live with the consequences.

This is, of course, madness.

There is a third way. A pragmatic, powerful way to get the best of both worlds. We call it the Hybrid Chapter Model.

That time everyone, and their dog adopted the 'Spotify Model

Now, I remember when the 'Spotify Model' was all the rage. I was at The Hut Group, when a product manager strutted into the office in media city one day, shared the shiny Spotify video, and announced this was the future. Honestly it felt like every tech company on the planet had drunk the cool aid and was now trying to reorganise itself into Squads, Chapters, and Tribes.

And on paper, it looked brilliant. The hard truth, as many of us discovered, is that you can’t just import a culture.

It’s now one of the industry's cautionary tales: a grand plan that even Spotify didn't fully implement in the way it was sold. It failed because those neat diagrams don't tell you about the immense, pre-existing foundation of trust and autonomy required to prevent the whole thing from collapsing into a mess of conflicting priorities.

This is the critical difference in the 90POE approach. We didn't import a diagram. We built a pragmatic foundation from the ground up, starting with the people. Our "Hybrid Chapter" wasn't a new set of reporting lines; it was a set of co-created cultural tools that gave us a shared identity and a clear purpose first.

The solution: A pragmatic hybrid

When I joined 90POE, the CPO had already made the smart move of breaking up the old centralised team and embedding designers directly into the cross-functional product streams. But he had the foresight to see the trap this would create: a team of isolated designers with no central home, no craft culture, and no consistency.

He knew he needed a Chapter Lead to solve this. That's where I came in.

My role was to architect the other half of the equation: the Hybrid Chapter Model. I was hired to build the "home base" that would unite these embedded designers and give them a shared culture, a single design system, and a clear career path.

Here’s how the model works.

1. The stream: The front line (for deep focus)

First and foremost, our designers are embedded in cross-functional product streams. This is where they live day-to-day, sitting alongside their partners in product and engineering. This is non-negotiable. It ensures they are deeply immersed in the gnarly, complex problems of their specific domain, whether that’s crewing logistics or vessel performance. They are on the front line, solving real problems for real users.

2. The chapter: The home base (for strong culture)

However, while a designer works in a stream, they belong to the Design Chapter. The chapter is their professional home. It is a central, horizontal team, led by the lead designer, that connects all designers across the company, regardless of which stream they are embedded in.

The chapter is where we protect our craft. It’s where we hold our tough, honest design critiques. It’s where we develop and maintain our design system. It’s where we provide mentorship and define career progression for designers, as designers. It’s a constant reminder that their primary loyalty is to the quality of the user experience and the coherence of the entire platform.

This hybrid structure is the engine of our design culture. It gives the business what it needs: deeply focused, domain-expert designers who can operate with speed and autonomy. And it gives the designers what they need: a strong sense of community, a safety net for feedback, and a clear path for growth in their chosen craft.

It kills the two great plagues of a scaling design team in a single move: designer isolation and inconsistency creep.
 

"Faced with this false choice between a lonely hermit and an out-of-touch artist, most companies just pick one and live with the consequences. This is, of course, madness."

But who owns what: The strategic split

Now, it’s easy to get hung up on who a designer’s ‘manager’ is on paper, especially when the HR system insists it can only be one person. The way I view it is simple.

• Heads of product (the stream): Own the "What." They are the experts in the business needs, identifying what problems we need to solve to deliver value. They manage the designer's focus on those stream-specific challenges.

• The chapter lead (my role): Owns the "How." My role is to ensure we solve those problems with excellence and consistency. While designers are embedded, I provide the strategic oversight that connects them. I'm responsible for:

  • Aligning the approach: Ensuring all designers, regardless of their stream, are using our design system and research principles in a consistent, sensible way.

  • Spotting synergy: I'm the only one who can see across all streams. This allows me to spot opportunities for synergy, connecting two seemingly separate projects to create a more powerful, unified solution.

  • Owning the holistic experience: My job is to protect the overall user experience, ensuring the platform feels like one coherent product, not a collection of bickering features.

This strategic partnership is far more important than who clicks the ‘approve holiday’ button. Product owns the business need; I own the design-centric solution.

The pragmatic payoff

So, you can stop the civil war. You can have your cake and eat it too. You just have to be willing to architect a system that is as thoughtful as the products you expect your team to build.

See this philosophy in action

This entire article is the "why" behind my "On building a design team" case study.

The principles here are the exact ones I used to transform a fragmented, contractor-led team into a cohesive, in-house design function. It's the story of building the cultural foundation, starting with a Design Charter and a Career Ladder, before we ever worried about diagrams.

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