One of my responsibilities when joining Bally Sports was to develop and lead the design organization. The product design team already had 2 junior members, but no processes, communication methods, tools, design system or principles in place. We also had dispersed and siloed regional designers, no UX research team, and no org operations or clear expectations. During my time at the company, I built the entire org and all operations from the ground up including teams for:

• Product design
• UX research
• Marketing design
• Content design

I established tool standards, project managament coordination and creative repositories, defined roles and responsibility levels that coincided with the appropriate salary bands, and built relationships with universities to develop internship programs that would nurture and foster budding talent. Our org co-created team principles, attributes and qualities that everyone was expected to live up to and embody in various ways—all that were rooted in our pride to be working alongside one another.

Bally Sports didn’t have a formalized process for individual feedback, so we created growth matrices, paths to improvement and repeated quarterly retros to constantly fine tune our team. But that also celebrated our wins. Despite being remote and only meeting in person a handful of times, we found ways to establish close bonds with each other that transcended work. We celebrated birthdays and life milestones, had inside jokes and hours-long Friday drawing sessions, and collectively attended virtual conferences while ordering lunches to feel as if we were there together.

Through a culturally and geographically diverse mix of interns, contractors, full-time, remote and hybrid creatives across every US time zone as well as India, we gradually found our harmony. It was a team I was deeply proud of and impressed with, and one with endless talent and potential.

One of my responsibilities when joining Bally Sports was to develop and lead the design organization. The product design team already had 2 junior members, but no processes, communication methods, tools, design system or principles in place. We also had dispersed and siloed regional designers, no UX research team, and no org operations or clear expectations. During my time at the company, I built the entire org and all operations from the ground up including teams for:

• Product design
• UX research
• Marketing design
• Content design

I established tool standards and creative repositories, defined roles and responsibility levels that coincided with the appropriate salary bands, and built relationships with universities to develop internship programs that would nurture and foster budding talent. Our org co-created team principles, attributes and qualities that everyone was expected to live up to and embody in various ways—all that were rooted in our pride to be working alongside one another.

Bally Sports didn’t have a formalized process for individual feedback, so we created growth matrices, paths to improvement and repeated quarterly retros to constantly fine tune our team. But that also celebrated our wins. Despite being remote and only meeting in person a handful of times, we found ways to establish close bonds with each other that transcended work. We celebrated birthdays and life milestones, had inside jokes and hours-long Friday drawing sessions, and collectively attended virtual conferences while ordering lunches to feel as if we were there together.

Through a culturally diverse mix of interns, contractors, full-time, remote and hybrid creatives across every US time zone as well as India, we gradually found our harmony. It was a team I was deeply proud of and impressed with, and one with endless talent and potential.