Case Study
Building a new organization
Building teams at Ona from founding to a 90 person company.
Quick Take
Objective
Ona had no design, product, or project management practice to inherit — every process had to be built while the product was being built.
Execution
I grew the design function from a solo practice to a team of three, trained project managers to run requirements and human centered design, and set the rules that made hand-off predictable across an 8-hour time split.
Results
The structure held for over a decade and 390+ projects and turned people I coached into independent leaders.
I
Problem
I joined Ona as a co-founder, not as a hire into an existing function. There was no design team, no product management, no research practice, and no agreed way for design and engineering to hand work to each other. There was a founding team, a product that didn’t exist yet, and partners — ministries of health, NGOs, funders — who needed to believe we could deliver before we had anything to show them.
The constraint underneath all of it was the business model. Ona was bootstrapped: client project work funded product investment, which meant every process I built had to serve two masters at once. A discovery phase that was right for the product was often wrong for the project paying for it. Getting that balance right took years of adjustment rather than a single fix.
So I didn’t just design the product. I designed how the work would happen — and then kept changing it as the company grew out of each version.
II
Approach
Five things I built
Organizational design for scale
I operated as a player-coach: hands-on as principal IC while hiring and mentoring a design team. I worked directly with engineering, business development, and clients, ran critiques, and set the bar for what “done” meant. The structure stayed deliberately small, because at our size specialization would have cost more in coordination than it returned in depth.
Research literacy for the entire project team
Design research couldn’t live only with designers — we were too small, and the people closest to users were project managers and the support team. I trained our PMs to run design research as part of standard project intake, so needs surfaced early from the people already in the room with clients.
Method matched to uncertainty
I came from agencies believing every project opens with extensive discovery. Running a startup changed that. The goal of design isn’t to follow a methodology, it’s to reduce risk wherever you are. Early on, finding the right problem, we ran workshops, contextual research, paper prototypes, and journey mapping. Once we were chasing revenue and users, I shifted the team to Lean UX and design sprints.
Operational rigor for a distributed team
I ran a structured goal-setting cycle to keep priorities aligned, built templates that turned design decisions into engineering-ready requirements, and wrote the rules for hand-off so a distributed team could work without waiting on me. We ran Agile practices suited to our size, on Asana and GitHub.
AI as a shared language
I introduced ChatGPT into my team’s workflow in 2023 for strategy framing and agendas, then pulled in Figma Make, UX Pilot, Claude Design, and Lovable as they matured. The real effect wasn’t speed. It was that non-designers could now participate in defining an experience, so we reached a working solution together in real time instead of through design-then-review.
III
Outcome
TEAM0 to 3Built the design function from a solo practice while staying hands-on as principal IC | ENABLEMENT7 PMsTrained to run design research as standard project intake | DELIVERY390+Projects shipped on the process over a decade |
REACH54OpenSRP projects with partner stakeholders coordinated through one shared process | SPEED4–6 wksNew country implementations, down from 3–6 months for OpenSRP | SCALE250+ millionForms submitted across platforms, serving thousands of users |
PROGRESSION12People I coached into independent leadership: product designers, managers, project managers | PARTNERSHIPSelected to help build Open Health Stack and be a showcase product | RECOGNITIONTIME 50Named a Genius Company for Ona’s mapping and field technology |
Team
Went from 5 to 90 amazing people
Role
Product Design Director / Co-founder
Expertise
Design Management / PM / OKRs / Org. Behavior
Highlight
90+ employees