Restructuring Design from Agile to Product-Oriented

Edify Education

Overview

Role

Design Manager / Lead Product Designer

Timeline

2021

Responsibilities

Team Structure & Org Design • People Management • Process Design • Cross-functional Alignment

Plaftorms

Web & Mobile

The Opportunity

Edify Education is a bilingual education platform for schools across Brazil. I managed its product design team, with up to 7 direct reports, through a period when Edify split off to become a standalone company.

As part of that transition, I co-led a restructuring of how the design team worked: moving it from a feature-team agile model to a product-oriented one.

The problem

Our design team worked inside a standard feature-team agile setup: one designer embedded per scrum team, working sprint to sprint.

In practice this meant design came in too late to shape strategy, and designers had little ownership over outcomes beyond their own team's backlog.

It also meant we were spread too thin: with only a handful of designers for the amount of product work underway, a lean one-designer-per-team model gave us no flexibility to shift effort to where it was needed most.

My role

The restructuring was a joint initiative with other leads as Edify became a standalone company, and I led it for design specifically, while continuing to manage the team day to day.

The org split also reshaped the team itself: a few designers chose to stay with the former parent organization rather than move with us, so part of the work was reorganizing a smaller team around the new model at the same time.

We moved away from embedding a single designer inside each scrum team and set up a flexible design pool instead, allocated by need rather than fixed by team.

The bigger shift was upstream: product managers and designers began working closely together to define problems and direction before engineering was brought in, rather than engineers sitting alongside design and PM from day one.

Engineering moved to the end of that process, building against direction design and PM had already aligned on.

The New Structure

The change unsettled people on both sides. Designers were anxious about what their new roles and scope would look like outside the familiar embedded-in-a-team setup, and the wider team pushed back on the unfamiliar rhythm.

The hardest thing to land was where design now sat in the product process: instead of one lean team building together end to end, design and PM worked upstream as a pair, with engineering downstream, and that reordering took real explanation before it stopped feeling like design was being pulled out of the team.

Challenges

Once the new structure settled in, the results showed up in a few ways: less rework, since problems were defined before engineering built against them; better allocation of a small design team across competing priorities; and closer alignment between PM and design decisions.

Design also moved much closer to strategy, and practices like design sprints became a regular, expected part of how the team worked rather than an occasional exercise. One project drafted during this period, under the new structure, is one the company is still working on today.

Outcome

Reflection

This experience taught me that structure is a design decision like any other: it has users (the people working inside it), constraints, and trade-offs, and it can be prototyped and iterated on the same way an interface can.

The resistance we hit wasn't a sign we'd gotten it wrong, it was the normal cost of changing how people work. That's shaped how I lead design teams since: structure follows what the product actually needs, not what's comfortable or familiar.