KNOW WHERE YOU STAND
Design Maturity and Capability Strategy
Know where your design capability stands. Build the strategy to lift it.
Start the ConversationPlenty of organisations have invested in design; fewer can see the impact of that investment. Design maturity is a quality question before it is a process one, and I work with your teams and your stakeholders to understand what is getting in the way. Then we fix it together.
How it works
This is not an audit done to your team. It starts with immersion: I interview your designers, their leaders, and the stakeholders across the business who receive design's work. I observe how the work actually gets done, and I go deep on the tools and ways of working underneath it. At WorkSafe Victoria, immersion ran six weeks.
What comes out is the honest picture: what is working, what is not, and what is stopping design from having real impact, whether the blocker is skills, ways of working, or how design connects to the decisions that matter.
What you get
Two things, and both stay when I leave.
A baseline maturity model, built from the immersion rather than pulled from a template. It shows where your practice stands today and what good looks like for your organisation, and it is built to be owned: your team tracks against it, manages it, and updates it as they improve.
A capability strategy you can act on: what to fix first, in what order, and the measures we will judge success by, agreed before the work begins. So later you are not debating whether it worked. You are reading the numbers.
For design leaders
Not every engagement starts with an executive. Some start with a design leader who knows exactly what design is worth and needs help making the case upward: the business case for the capability, the structure, the investment. That work can stand alone, shaped to what you need and what your executives are asking for, in the language they understand.
Results
At WorkSafe, I identified the gaps and opportunities in the design team's capability and delivered the strategy to close them. Six months on, team sentiment was up 34% against the metrics we set at the start.
“Sammi was a joy to work with. She clearly identified gaps and opportunities for capability growth and delivered a training strategy to uplift WorkSafe's design capability. After 6 months we noted a strong uplift across the areas identified, received positive stakeholder feedback and saw a 34% uplift in team sentiment which all aligned to the strategy's key metrics for success.”
Let's Connect
Tell me where your team is stuck. Thirty minutes, no deck, and a straight answer.
Most of my work is in Melbourne and Geelong, and I work Australia-wide when the engagement calls for it.
Start the Conversation