Sitetracker

TL;DR card

One-line outcome. Built the design function from zero and made Jobs to Be Done the language product, engineering, and QA used to make decisions together.

Role and scope. Director of Product Design and Head of Design at Sitetracker, June 2021 to March 2023. Built the design discipline from the ground up. Peer to the Head of Product (Ian Ezra) and engineering leadership. Stood up a parallel design and product team in India to support global expansion.

Metric chips.

• Design function built from zero. Hiring loop, skill matrix, career ladder, and mentorship framework all established within tenure.
• Company-wide adoption of Jobs to Be Done as the shared product decision framework across design, product, engineering, and QA.
• Parallel US and India design and product teams stood up alongside global expansion, on shared standards and culture.

Context

Sitetracker did not need designers dropped into a broken process. It needed the conditions for design to work. The company had built a real business without a real design function. Product development habits were closer to waterfall than to anything I would call modern. Design sat downstream. Reviews happened late. Product, engineering, and QA had no shared language for the decisions they were making together.

The real problem was not that Sitetracker lacked designers. It was that the company had not yet built the conditions for design to shape product decisions.

Mandate

Build design as a durable discipline, not just hire designers. The charge was organizational. Set up the operating system the function needed. Shift product development toward customer-centered methods. Earn design a peer seat at the start of a product cycle, not a polish pass at the end.

Scope

• Built and led the design function from scratch across the US and India.
• Owned hiring, career development, mentorship, process, and quality standards.
• Peer to the Head of Product (Ian Ezra) and engineering leadership.
• Standing seat in weekly leadership reviews of features and projects.
• Stood up design and product capability in India alongside US growth.

Authority was organizational and earned. Nothing was inherited.

Key decisions

Assess before hiring. The default move is to hire fast. I held the hiring trigger long enough to map what kind of design capability Sitetracker actually needed, not what a generic design org chart looked like. The skill matrix came before any job description. Early hires were calibrated to the real gaps, not to seniority tiers borrowed from someone else's company.

Skill-matrix hiring loop, not spec-based. I replaced credential-filtering job specs with a process that scored candidates on demonstrated capability. That cut gut-call bias. It also made hiring decisions legible to product and engineering leadership so they could co-validate, not rubber-stamp.

JTBD as a company-wide framework, not a design-only tool. Jobs to Be Done could have stayed inside the design team as a research method. I pushed it outward instead. I ran workshops and one-on-one coaching with product, engineering, and QA so JTBD became the shared decision language. Not a deliverable design owned. The framework stuck because it lived in how people argued about product decisions, not in a document that gathered dust.

Build India capability in parallel, not in sequence. Global expansion needed more than headcount. I built training, process, and culture in the India team alongside the US team so the function could scale without a quality cliff at the boundary. India was a peer node from the start, not a delivery arm.

Career ladder and mentorship before headcount growth. I wrote the design career ladder and the mentorship framework before the team grew past the first few hires. New designers walked into a system that already told them what growth looked like and how to get coached toward it.

What changed

• Design function went from absent to operating with a career ladder, a mentorship framework, and a skill-matrix hiring loop. None of those existed on day one.
• Jobs to Be Done moved from a design research method to the shared decision framework across design, product, engineering, and QA.
• Design moved earlier in the product cycle. Late-stage rework dropped because decisions were being made together upfront.
• India design and product capability stood up with the same standards, training, and culture as the US team. Global expansion no longer carried a quality cliff at the boundary.
• Design became a peer leadership function in product reviews. The bar held across shipped work, prototypes, and in-progress reviews.

Outcomes

The function I installed at Sitetracker is the evidence. A skill matrix that defined the gap before any job description. A hiring loop scored against demonstrated capability, not credential filter. A career ladder and mentorship framework written before headcount growth. A weekly critique culture. JTBD adopted company-wide as the shared decision language across design, product, engineering, and QA. A parallel India design and product capability stood up to the same standards as the US team. Design moved earlier in the product cycle and held a peer seat in leadership review. The operating system kept working after my tenure.

Leadership lens

Building a design discipline inside a company that has never had one is mostly organizational design. The craft matters. The bigger lever is whether the rest of the company has a way to use design to make better product decisions. I did not improve the output at Sitetracker. I changed the operating system. Output improvements are reversible. They depend on who is in the room. The operating system keeps working when no one is. The skill matrix, the career ladder, the JTBD framework, and the global process standards outlasted my tenure.

What I did with my hands

Player-coach proof. The work was authored, not just sponsored. I wrote the skill matrix, ran the hiring loop, taught the JTBD workshops, drafted the career ladder, and coached the mentorship pairs through their first cycles. The system did not arrive prewired. I built it.

• Skill matrix. Capability-by-seniority grid I authored before writing any job descriptions. Team building started from a structural read of the gap, not a generic org chart.
• JTBD workshop materials. Facilitation guide and session outputs from the workshops I ran with product, engineering, and QA. The methodology was taught, not just described.
• Career ladder. Level definitions, expectations per level, and the coaching language used in growth conversations.

AI threading

N/A. The Sitetracker engagement (June 2021 to March 2023) predates the period when AI tooling was practically integrated into design and product workflows at the level this case study documents. The JTBD adoption, hiring loop, and global capability work stand on their own evidence. The AI-native player-coach proof lives in the current ventures cluster (Simple Cortex, Nibbble, Kintsu), not here.

Reflection

I would push the cross-functional JTBD work earlier. I ran the workshops and the coaching, but I let the design function consolidate for a stretch before extending the methodology outward to product and engineering. Starting both threads at once would have compressed the cultural change curve and given the rest of the org more reps with the framework before it had to carry real product decisions.

When that machinery is in place, the team can grow without losing the bar.