Building a Product Design Practice at 3Cloud

When I joined 3Cloud in 2022, the Product Design team was just three people supporting a fast-growing consulting business. The leadership challenge was clear: clients expected more than technical delivery — they wanted outcomes, not outputs. To meet that expectation, I needed to:

• Scale a new discipline quickly while maintaining quality and cohesion.
   
• Build a culture from scratch that fostered collaboration, ownership, and psychological safety.
   
• Shift the client mindset from short-term project delivery to long-term product thinking.
   
• Integrate design into business strategy in a way that proved its value as a revenue driver, not just a support function.

I treated the challenge as both an organizational design problem and a cultural transformation. The steps included:

Define the Vision & Model

• Established a clear north star: a Product Consulting practice that blended UX, Product Management, and Agile delivery.
• Aligned with executives to position product design as a strategic differentiator, not just a support function.
   

Recruit & Scale the Team Intentionally

• Built hiring profiles focused on cross-disciplinary, "T-shaped" skills and collaborative mindset.
• Scaled from 3 to 40 people in 10 months by combining strategic recruiting with redeploying internal talent.

Establish Culture Through Servant Leadership

• Modeled servant leadership — creating psychological safety, encouraging ownership, and empowering decision-making.
• Introduced rituals for collaboration, retrospectives, and cross-team learning.
   

Shift Clients from Projects to Products

• Reframed engagements around long-term business outcomes rather than one-off deliverables.
• Embedded product consultants in strategic planning, ensuring design was tied to measurable value.
   

Develop People as Strategic Partners

• Coached the team to step beyond execution — facilitating workshops, leading client conversations, and influencing business roadmaps.
• Created growth paths and mentoring structures to sustain capability development.
   

• Business Growth: Client retention improved, translating into expanded engagements and repeat business worth millions in annual revenue.
   
• Sales Differentiation: Product design became a deciding factor in multimillion-dollar wins, with executives and sales teams leveraging design-led storytelling to stand apart from competitors.
   
• Cultural Transformation: The new practice instilled a sense of ownership and empowerment. Designers began leading client workshops, influencing roadmaps, and driving outcomes—not just deliverables.
   
• Delivery Acceleration: Agile, product-led ways of working cut delivery friction, reduced time-to-value, and created scalable frameworks that other teams could adopt.

This initiative was proof that leadership is not about scaling numbers—it’s about scaling vision and culture. By transforming a small team into a strategic practice, we didn’t just improve delivery—we changed how clients see the value of design, how teams experience their work, and how the business positions itself in the market.

It matters because it demonstrates that when you invest in people, culture, and clarity of purpose, you don’t just build a bigger team—you build a capability that transforms the company.