Case 05 · AKQA · 2021 –
Room to grow into.
How I manage a team like a product.
Six
I inherited a team I was already on.
FIG.01
THE TEAM · MID-2021
THE BENCH — CREATIVE LEADS · CLIENT SERVICE · DELIVERY · STRATEGY
Mid-2021, we were six: two seniors, three mids, one junior. We had survived the shock of the pandemic together. When the previous lead took a growth opportunity on another account, the team passed to me. Peer to lead, not an outside hire. I knew the work because I had been doing it beside them.
I leaned on leads who had run the account before me, while I learned to be the person my own team could lean on. There was a bench of them and I went to it often. The partners in client service, delivery, and strategy stayed put too, and we ended up staying together as the group that grew the team.
The only decision of that first year that mattered was that the team’s growth would get the same rigor as anything we shipped for a client. There were no decks. Nothing was written down. It ran on conversations and on trust earned one at a time, and the templates and the documentation came years later. I had grown up inside a room somebody else made. Now the room was mine to make.
Shape
Six became twenty-three in two years. By mid-2023 the team was nearly four times the one I inherited, and the number is the least interesting part of it.
FIG.02 — THE CANOPY
The team, drawn as a grove · mid-2021 · 6 — mid-2023 · 23 — today · 18
MEASURED 10:00 EDT 13 AUG 2026 · AZ 97 · EL 36
18TODAY
The seniors grow tall. The canopy lifts. The floor lights up, and the saplings arrive in it.
As we grew I hired more mids and juniors than seniors, staffing below the seniority the work seemed to ask for. The point was to leave room for the six to grow into. I kept the top seats scarce on purpose.
What I got wrong was who would end up being the leads to lean on. When the pressure turned down, the adrenaline went with it. I had been reading that adrenaline as commitment. As airlines returned to business as usual, most of the original six cycled off the account and a new group came through to refresh the passion for the client and the problems we were solving for. Moving between accounts is ordinary at an agency.
The headroom I had built for the six was still there when the next group arrived, and they grew into it. Promotions kept coming on the account through those years, and several people earned two of them.
The bet had a cost, and it belongs in the ledger as much as the promotions do. The same headroom that let people rise pushed the mids to grow a little faster than they would have had to otherwise. A team designed for internal growth is a team under deliberate strain. I would make the call again.
Room
My first act as lead was a ritual. In 2021 I started a weekly pin-up so a team of six working in silos could see one another’s work. Visibility was the point; consistency came with it. It came before any hire.
It still runs, and it has been rebuilt more than once. It is bi-weekly now, and it is called the Table Read, after the theatre practice where the script is read aloud before anyone performs it. A table read is unfinished by definition. That is the permission the name grants. Another restructure is underway as I write this.
What holds through the versions is the constraint. It is short. There is no deck, no polish, no walkthrough of the details. Someone from each project brings the working board as it stands and frames it before defending it: the ask, the problem, the measure of whether it worked. The read trains framing, which is the skill a default crit never quite gets around to teaching.
I don’t have a single standout story from years of these. What I have is a pattern I’ve watched repeat: shyer, less vocal designers becoming comfortable speaking in front of larger and larger groups. Those groups now include client presentations and AKQA’s regional town halls.
Tools
The rituals hold because they are tooled. In the years since that first pin-up the team built its own infrastructure, most of it in-house and most of it invisible from outside.
Table Read templates, so the ritual survives contact with a busy week. Onboarding documentation that gets a new designer productive inside the account’s complexity. A Figma organization with working templates underneath it, so files start structured instead of getting structured later. An internal design system for the team’s own artifacts. Presentation templates spanning Keynote and Figma. AI onboarding and implementation guides, written as we’ve started working this way, still on the path there. And the agent pipeline that documents design decisions as the designers work, 150 components documented at the time of writing, which became a case of its own.
- Table Read templates
- Onboarding documentation
- Figma organization + templates
- Internal design system
- Presentation templates
- Agentic Pipeline
FIG.04 — THE CASCADE
What the team runs on, over time · each established curve raises the floor the next starts from
An established curve stops costing attention and starts bearing load — that is the room.
A lot of the people running on this now arrived after it was built.
What the team runs on is a system no one can see: structure, rituals, and tooling doing quiet work that only announces itself when it goes missing.
It’s not the system I’ve been designing the longest, but it’s the one I’ve enjoyed tinkering with the most.
Eighteen
Twenty-three was the peak. In 2024 Delta started growing an internal design team, and our scope has narrowed as theirs has grown. It came gradually rather than as an event, and the team stands at eighteen today.
Not everyone who moved off the account moved by choice.
The rituals and the tooling didn’t shrink with the team. Eighteen people run on them daily.
We have retooled how the account is run a few times. Before the current model we tried pods: a group that moved as a whole, but wasn’t dedicated to a particular line of business, so the subject matter kept changing underneath it. In 2026 we moved to squads, built so people develop deep subject expertise, and away from the flexible model that had designers going wherever the account needed them.
Six months in, the ledger is mixed. People feel the deeper knowledge. They also miss the wider exposure the flexible years gave them: a variety of work and stakeholders across the account, rather than feeling tied to one group.
Six months isn’t long enough to know whether we got that trade right. We have retooled this account before.