Problem
Design teams rarely get structured development beyond ad-hoc feedback and the occasional conference ticket. At DragonPass there was clear appetite to grow — but no vehicle for it. Skills like connecting design decisions to business outcomes, working confidently with behavioural data, and adopting new tooling were spread unevenly across the team, and left to chance.
Objective
Create a recurring, named forum — Design with Ant — where the design team levels up together: practical sessions, grounded in the team's real work, building capabilities the day-to-day doesn't teach.
What I did
- Made it a series, not a one-off. Multiple sessions under a consistent identity, building an expectation of continuous development rather than occasional training.
- Taught commercial fluency. A worked session on translating design into measurable business impact — the chain from business goal → user behaviour → design change → primary metric, with counter metrics as guardrails against “winning the wrong way” and cannibalisation as the difference between local and net impact. Grounded in real examples, including a live lounge pre-booking scenario walked through the full chain, down to the roll-back signal.
- Made it stick beyond the room. Built a reusable one-page canvas — “the bet” and “the checks” — that designers apply to their own live work, turning a 30-minute session into an ongoing practice.
- Kept sessions lean and practical. Tight formats, publicly referenceable examples over internal jargon, and exercises over lectures.
Outcome
A design team with a shared language for commercial impact — able to articulate not just what they designed, but what it moved.
A repeatable enablement format that costs little to run and compounds over time.