Overview

When MySite acquired Harvest Digital Planning, The HiVE didn’t merge with Social Pinpoint, it replaced it. The product I had spent years designing and building was rebranded as the new Social Pinpoint, and the original Social Pinpoint was sunsetted. It was a significant validation of the work done in those early years, and it came with an equally significant new challenge.

The Social Pinpoint designer left the week the transition happened. Consultation Manager, the third product in the MySite suite, focused on stakeholder management, had a barely started design system and no designer to steward it. And I was now responsible for design across all three products, for the first time, during a period of rapid company growth, with a team of one.

What followed was one of the most challenging and most formative periods of my career.

The Challenge

On paper, the design system situation was straightforward, The HiVE’s system, which I had built, was now the Social Pinpoint system. In practice, the transition brought its own complexity. The Social Pinpoint designer had left behind a separate design system that needed to be understood, assessed, and wound down thoughtfully rather than just discarded. And Consultation Manager had a barely started system, a previous designer had made a beginning before leaving, but what remained was fragile and incomplete.

So the reality was three design systems at three different levels of maturity, a company growing faster than design capacity could keep up with, and the task of figuring out how to lead a design function for the first time while all of this was happening simultaneously. The honest version of this period is that the gap between what needed doing and what was humanly possible felt very wide on more days than I’d like to admit.

Approach

The systems work came first, because it had to. The HiVE design system carried forward as the foundation for the new Social Pinpoint, but that transition still required careful work to ensure it could serve the new product context without gaps. At the same time, Consultation Manager needed design attention it had never properly received.

Rather than trying to immediately align Consultation Manager with Social Pinpoint, I made the deliberate decision to stabilise and evolve its existing system first, which is where the most important hire of this period came in.

The first designer I brought onto the team was based remotely in the Philippines and had only recently started learning English. She was meticulous, deeply committed, and genuinely talented, but she lacked confidence. From day one I made a deliberate choice to treat her not as a junior to be managed but as an equal, as a team of two figuring it out together. The effect was almost immediate. Her confidence grew visibly and quickly, and the work she produced for Consultation Manager, evolving that barely-started system into something genuinely superior, is something I’m immensely proud of. Not just as a design outcome, but as a signal of what the right environment can unlock in people.

As the team continued to grow, that same principle held. A designer with strong UX skills joined to work across both products, bringing research and systems thinking that complemented the UI rigour already in the team. Most recently a full-stack designer joined from Canada, the team is now global, distributed across time zones, and genuinely collaborative across all of it.

Running alongside all of the systems and team work was a quieter but equally important effort, embedding design thinking beyond the design team. Not through workshops or frameworks, but through the way we communicated. Working transparently, inviting product managers and engineers into the design process early, asking questions about the problem before presenting solutions, and making space for people across the organisation to have genuine input into what we were building. Design thinking as organisational practice isn’t a methodology. It’s a habit of communication, sustained over time.

Outcomes

The HiVE’s design system carried forward as the foundation of the new Social Pinpoint, validated by the acquisition and strengthened through the transition. Consultation Manager has a design system that has been evolved from a fragile beginning into something genuinely robust, a result of giving the right person the right environment to do their best work. The design team has grown from one to a small global team, each owning their product space while sharing a common design language and culture.

The next challenge, bringing Social Pinpoint and Consultation Manager into full design alignment, is still ahead. That’s not a failure. It’s the next chapter, and it’s one the team is now equipped to take on.

Reflection

I came into this period thinking the job was to fix the systems. And it was, that work was real and necessary. But what I discovered is that the work I care about most is the human side of design leadership. Creating the conditions where a designer who lacks confidence can find it. Building a culture where cross-functional collaboration isn’t a process you follow but a way of working you genuinely believe in. Fostering design thinking not as a discipline that belongs to designers but as an organisational habit that makes everyone’s work better.

The systems matter. The culture matters more.