Leading design across teams, products and strategic accounts.
A multidisciplinary leadership practice connecting people development, governance, research and complex client relationships.
- Role
- Experience Design Manager
- Focus
- Design leadership
Objective brought together products, strategic accounts and 13 smaller-scale teams across varied contexts and levels of design maturity. During the most concentrated period, May led simultaneous groups of 10, 4 and 5 designers, totaling 19 professionals.
The leadership challenge was to preserve quality and context across parallel initiatives while developing people, supporting strategic accounts and improving how design operated inside multidisciplinary delivery.
May led UX, UI, Product Design, Research and Writing professionals, connecting their work with product, technology, business and client stakeholders. Her portfolio at Objective also included strategic experience work for BS2.
How leadership shaped the work.
- Created training, templates and operating models that made quality expectations easier to understand.
- Established review and alignment practices suited to different products and client contexts.
- Supported designers through feedback, mentoring, development plans and clearer responsibilities.
- Moderated relationships with strategic and complex clients while protecting team context and delivery quality.
- Connected research, usability, accessibility and privacy concerns to the wider delivery model.
- Restructured workflows and boards, and created workshops and training that designers could apply across teams.
- Defined LGPD criteria for research, trained designers to replicate them and became a reference for reviews and questions.
- Wrote articles for the brand, extending design knowledge beyond project delivery.
Choices made explicit for the team.
- Adapt the operating model to each context while preserving common quality principles.
- Connect accessibility, usability and privacy to delivery decisions rather than treating them as final checks.
- Balance client proximity with the autonomy and development needs of each team.
- Use multidisciplinary allocation to match the skills required by each strategic account.
- Keep career development visible even during demanding client delivery cycles.
Strategic impact and outcomes.
- A more legible design practice across concurrent teams and strategic engagements.
- Reusable standards that supported delivery without erasing the needs of each context.
- Greater connection between design quality, people development and client value.
- Active career development through IDPs, mentoring, growth planning and mapping of gaps and opportunities.
- More support for designers to balance demanding work, personal context and sustainable professional growth.
Leadership across multiple teams depends on shared principles, contextual judgment and visible support.