Design Management
Leading distributed design teams across 11 product teams and 6 time zones — building culture, process, and quality at scale.
The Challenge
Managing a globally distributed design organization across 11 product teams and 6 time zones presents unique alignment challenges. Without intentional structure, teams default to siloed decision-making — leading to inconsistent design quality, duplicated effort, misaligned KPIs, and designers who feel disconnected from the broader mission.
The challenge was to create coherence across a large, distributed team while preserving the autonomy and creative energy that makes each product team effective.
The Solution
I was promoted to lead all Neon project products after demonstrating the ability to maintain quality and alignment across complex, concurrent design workstreams. My approach centers on three pillars: clear process, strong culture, and continuous feedback.
By establishing shared rituals — weekly design critiques, cross-team syncs, and quarterly KPI reviews — we created a rhythm that keeps all 40+ designers informed, connected, and moving in the same direction regardless of geography or time zone.
Management Principles
Effective design management is as much about people as it is about process. My leadership approach is grounded in creating an environment where designers can do their best work — with clear expectations, space to grow, and direct access to the business context that makes design decisions meaningful.
- Capacity management Balancing team load across sprints, planning ahead for peak demand, and protecting creative focus time
- Quality assurance UI/UX consistency reviews across all products to maintain a unified design standard
- Career development Regular 1:1s, skills mapping, and growth plans for each direct report
- Stakeholder communication Communicating design progress and blockers upward and outward to keep teams aligned
- Process design Building lightweight, repeatable workflows that reduce friction without constraining creativity
Impact
Under this management model, the EY Assurance design organization grew from a reactive, project-by-project function to a strategic, proactive design practice — embedded at every stage of product development and recognized as a core driver of product quality across the entire Neon portfolio.
"Pratt was my Design Lead for two years. He was always a benchmark when it comes to making things work out, understanding and communicating with business teams, and achieving great results with limited tools.
For our team, his leadership has always been crucial. He used to find the exact point between demanding from us what he knows we can do and taking care of ourselves so that nobody collapses. He also collaborated a lot with other teams to build better things together.
He was the one who brings solutions and ideas and keeps things moving forward, even when priorities changed all the time and it was very difficult to keep up. That's very valuable for me, considering that the design processes were confusing and overwhelming at the company.
I don't think there are many Pratts out there, who can manage everything at the same time. We have learned too much from him these years and I'm so thankful for that."
