Creating Pion's first Design Org
From an internal agency nobody valued to a function the C-suite calls on directly.
Pion had no unified design organisation when I took over brand design, merged it with product design and research, and became Global Head of Design. Brand design had been running as an internal agency: thirteen designers, two copywriters and a single project manager, working reactively for whichever department asked first. Seniors did junior work and juniors did senior work. Nobody outside the team knew what brand design was worth.
Diagnosis
I spent my first weeks interviewing the team three times over and every stakeholder they worked with, to separate what was actually broken from what only felt broken. The team wanted to be paid more. Pay follows market value, and market value follows visibility. That became the plan.
The new model
I replaced the agency model with named studios, each paired to the department that used design most: Growth Marketing, B2B Marketing, Product, and Sales. Every studio had a designer attached by name, embedded in that department's work. I flattened the management layer, promoting one manager to creative lead and letting another go, and simplified briefing so seniors owned their studio's workload directly, with AI filtering the intake that used to sit with one project manager. The whole shift went from taking over the function to shipped in six weeks.
Narrative design
I also invented a role that didn't exist: brand narrative manager, hired to rewrite how Pion talks about itself from the top down, not just in emails and push notifications. It replaced a copywriter role stuck in execution-only work.
What it cost
Not everyone wanted this. The project manager and design manager who'd held the old system together both left, unwilling to work inside a structure with less centralised control. I also moved the whole cost centre off billable hours, which meant convincing finance to rebuild how design was costed from scratch.
A year on
A year on, every designer has had two salary reviews and sits within national benchmark, an average uplift of 14%. The creative lead and narrative lead won top awards at the company's summer event. Design now works directly with the CPO and CEO on narrative strategy, and with sales on the throughline for a new operating system launching later this year.