Design Chapter Lead
Building the people, practices, and operating model behind RBC's design organisation
As Design Chapter Lead, the work shifted from individual delivery to organisational capability — hiring and developing designers, establishing craft standards, defining how design operated across product teams, and building the conditions that let a growing chapter do its best work consistently.
Context & Constraints
Scaling design inside a large financial institution requires more than hiring — it means establishing shared craft standards, creating the conditions for designers to grow, and building an operating model that gives distributed teams the autonomy to move quickly while staying coherent. As chapter lead, the challenge was to make design a credible, enabling function inside one of Canada's largest organisations — not a bottleneck, not a service desk, but a genuine driver of product quality.
Scale without losing quality
As the chapter grew, maintaining a consistent bar for design quality across independent product teams required shared standards and genuine craft leadership, not just process.
Designer growth and retention
Building a chapter people want to stay in — with clear growth paths, honest feedback, and work that challenges them — is itself a design problem.
Operating model clarity
Distributed teams needed to know how design decisions were made, where to go for support, and how design work connected to business and product goals.
Full case study detail — chapter structure, hiring approach, craft initiatives, and outcomes — coming soon.
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