Building design & delivery systems at Collectiv

The brief

Collectiv needed more than project-by-project design delivery. As a growing product organization, the constraint was structural: how to turn corporate goals into a coherent roadmap, staff a global design capability, and keep quality high without burning cost or clarity.

The work spanned Lagos, India, Virginia, and Tennessee — different time zones, different strengths, one delivery system.

My role

Design Operations Officer / COO, with Director of Design responsibilities fulfilled in parallel. Ownership covered:

• Design operations model and delivery cadence
• Roadmap translation from corporate strategy into sequenced work
• Collaboration across a global team (Lagos, India, Virginia, Tennessee); team size: 3 core, plus up to 3 contractors as needed
• Resource allocation and cost reduction while meeting strategic business objectives
• Clarity and guidance for design, marketing and customer experience

I stepped into the operations role to keep projects moving from concept to delivery, while also covering the Director of Design role.

Process

1. Diagnose the real constraint — Separated “we need more designers” from “we need a clearer system for deciding what gets designed.”
2. Roadmap from goals, not requests — Tied initiative intake to corporate outcomes so the backlog reflected strategy, not volume.
3. Design the team people can run — Defined roles, handoffs, and cadence across distributed hubs so work moved without heroics.
4. Cost and resource clarity — Made capacity and spend visible enough to make tradeoffs early.

The system

Outcome

Led design and operations for a global team across Lagos, India, Virginia and Tennessee: a product roadmap extracted from corporate goals, optimized resource allocation, and reduced costs while meeting strategic business objectives.

Team size: 3 core, plus up to 3 contractors as needed.

Cost impact: [placeholder]