design leader mindset
I help CEOs and CPOs whose design function needs to be fixed, staffed, and handed off. Not a consultant with a deck. A leader with a start date and an end date.
Book a meeting
Last engagement: 1,700 candidates screened, three senior designers and a Director of Product Design hired, a research function stood up, and the whole system handed off in writing.
I Run design until you have someone who can
Founder-led or VP-Product-led design works until it doesn't. The team grows past what one non-designer can manage. Hiring stalls because nobody can read a portfolio. Research is whoever happened to ask a customer about the thing that mattered.. The permanent leader is six months away at best.
I step in as Head or VP of Design with full ownership of the function: the team, the hiring, the tooling, the operating rhythm. Then I hand it off to the permanent hire and leave.
And the quiet part, since it's usually why the phone rings: there's a person or two who should have been managed out a while ago. Everyone knows it, nobody wants to be the one, and the longer it waits the more it costs the people doing the carrying. I take that part of the job. I run a fair evaluation against a written bar instead of a mood, and when the answer is exit, I own it: the decision, the conversation, the transition. Sometimes the evaluation comes back the other way and the person everyone wrote off turns out to be misassigned, not underperforming. Either way, you get an answer you can defend, and it isn't you who had to be the villain.
At Bubble I ran the design org as interim Head of Design, restructured designer assignments across a company-wide product reorganization, managed exits fairly and without stalling the roadmap, hired three senior designers and the permanent Director of Product Design, and overlapped with her for three weeks so nothing landed on her desk cold.
Hire designers who can do the job you actually have
Most design hiring fails at the top of the funnel. The resume reads well, the portfolio looks good, and four interviews later the panel finds out the candidate has never done the job the role actually is. That's a month of everyone's time spent learning something a ten-minute screen should have caught.
At Bubble, I ran four concurrent IC searches plus a Director search. Over 1,700 candidates crossed my desk in nine months on the three IC roles alone. About 1,300 didn't survive the first pass; 436 earned a full structured read against the bar, and on the three largest roles my pre-screen verdict matched the final panel outcome 94 to 96 percent of the time. The recruiter ran first-round screens I never had to redo; three senior designers were hired, and the Director was in the seat before I left.
The number isn't luck. It's apparatus:
• Role bars that name the disqualifiers. What the role needs, what no amount of polish compensates for, and the order to check them in.
• Structured screens at every stage. Recruiter screen, hiring-manager screen, portfolio panel, design crit, with rubrics and advancement thresholds the panel can apply without me in the room.
• Calibration. A log of where the process got it wrong and why, so the bar tightens over time instead of drifting with whoever interviewed last.
• Panel protocols for exec attendees. Where the VP sits in the loop, what they test, and how their read gets weighed against the panel's.
• 30-day onboarding plans for each hire, with pod relationships built in week one.
I also sat on PM loops as the design interviewer, because design's read on a PM candidate is signal the panel shouldn't lose.
Build the Product design people system
A design team without a ladder runs on vibes. Titles drift, reviews are a manager's mood, and every hire is negotiated from scratch because nobody wrote down what Senior means here.
I write the ladder and everything that hangs off it: level definitions by scope, autonomy, and influence; a job description and hiring process per level; a performance evaluation format managers can run without me; and a hiring plan sequenced against the product roadmap and the engineering plan, so design grows in step instead of behind.
I built this from scratch at Sigma and rebuilt it at Bubble. The ladder is the same DNA every hiring manager in this profession uses; what changes per company is the scope at each rung.
Make research something the whole team can run
Research at most startups is a tool subscription and a Slack channel. The power users answer every survey. The PMs who know a researcher get studies; the rest guess. Incentives come out of someone's corporate card.
I set up research operations: platform selection, recruiting workflows, participant sourcing, incentive budgets, consent, templates. The goal is PMs and designers running their own studies on a shared system, not a research team as a bottleneck.
I have working relationships at Maze, User Interviews, Listen Labs, Great Question, Voice Panel, Rally, and Figma. That means pilots and pricing conversations that start on week one, not after a month of demos, and a straight answer on which tools will still be worth paying for next year.
At Bubble I ran the vendor evaluation (Maze, Rally, Listen Labs, Great Question, UserTesting), moved the company onto Maze with 50 studies budgeted for the year, built three recruiting workflows for moderated, unmoderated, and external-panel studies, partnered with Data Science to segment participants so power users stop drowning out everyone else, and stood up a quarterly new-user study any PM can own.
I Leave Behind a function that runs without me
The measure of an interim engagement is what's true the week after it ends. Everything I build is documented for the person inheriting it: the career ladder, job descriptions and hiring process per level, performance evaluations, the hiring plan, a dossier on every designer, org state of play, the hiring apparatus, research operations, tool ownership and billing. The permanent leader gets a system, not a set of habits that lived in my head.
How an engagement works
Scoped, then scaled down. Full-time while the function needs it. Part-time with named ownership (hiring, vendors, a specific project) as the team stabilizes. A set exit date from day one.
Ownership, not advice. I make the calls a design leader makes: assignments, hires, tool contracts, tradeoffs. You get a leader, not a recommendation memo.
Handoff is the deliverable. From the first week, I'm writing for my successor. If the permanent hire is already in the pipeline, I'll help close them and overlap with them.
AI-native by default. I bring my own AI tooling for hiring analysis, research synthesis, and documentation, calibrated to your company; you keep everything it produces, plus the process rules that keep designers thinking instead of prompting. The tooling itself stays mine.
Who this is for
Who this is for
• Series A through C companies with a product team and no design leader.
• A CPO or VP Product who owns design and would rather not.
• A company between design leaders, with a search underway or about to start. I'll hold the seat, run the search, and close the hire; at Bubble all three happened inside one engagement.
• A design team that needs hiring, research, or process fixed before a permanent leader arrives.
• A team with a performance problem everyone knows about and nobody has named.
What changes when I start: your CPO stops being the acting design leader, and your board stops asking about the empty seat.
Who this is Not for
Agencies looking for a product designer, or companies that want a design leader without the authority to lead.
what people are saying
Bill Palombi
VP of Product @ Prefect.io
As a product leader without a strong design background, I had a couple of false starts in establishing the design function at our growth stage startup. Julie's coaching was instrumental in re-establishing our design organization. She helped me define the core competencies we needed, establish a robust hiring process, and identify key signals of talent in portfolios and interviews. Her guidance was crucial in setting me and my initial design hires up for success as we drove our product's next phase of growth.
Rob Woolen
CTO / Co-founder at Sigma Computing
Julie was Sigma’s founding design leader, joining at inception and helping scale the company from zero to $50M in annual recurring revenue. She built the design function from the ground up—establishing the team, defining the process, and ensuring design scaled in step with the business. Julie’s leadership transformed design into a competitive advantage: she aligned product vision with user needs, created clear standards that empowered cross‑functional teams to move fast, and embedded design into the company’s growth engine. The result was a design culture and practice that produced products customers loved while directly fueling Sigma’s rapid expansion.
Have a design function that needs a leader?
Contact Me
©️ 2026, Julie Lynn Lemieux
©️ 2026, Julie Lynn Lemieux
design leader mindset
I help CEOs and CPOs whose design function needs to be fixed, staffed, and handed off. Not a consultant with a deck. A leader with a start date and an end date.
Book a meeting
Last engagement: 1,700 candidates screened, three senior designers and a Director of Product Design hired, a research function stood up, and the whole system handed off in writing.
I Run design until you have someone who can
Founder-led or VP-Product-led design works until it doesn't. The team grows past what one non-designer can manage. Hiring stalls because nobody can read a portfolio. Research is whoever happened to ask a customer about the thing that mattered.. The permanent leader is six months away at best.
I step in as Head or VP of Design with full ownership of the function: the team, the hiring, the tooling, the operating rhythm. Then I hand it off to the permanent hire and leave.
And the quiet part, since it's usually why the phone rings: there's a person or two who should have been managed out a while ago. Everyone knows it, nobody wants to be the one, and the longer it waits the more it costs the people doing the carrying. I take that part of the job. I run a fair evaluation against a written bar instead of a mood, and when the answer is exit, I own it: the decision, the conversation, the transition. Sometimes the evaluation comes back the other way and the person everyone wrote off turns out to be misassigned, not underperforming. Either way, you get an answer you can defend, and it isn't you who had to be the villain.
At Bubble I ran the design org as interim Head of Design, restructured designer assignments across a company-wide product reorganization, managed exits fairly and without stalling the roadmap, hired three senior designers and the permanent Director of Product Design, and overlapped with her for three weeks so nothing landed on her desk cold.
Hire designers who can do the job you actually have
Most design hiring fails at the top of the funnel. The resume reads well, the portfolio looks good, and four interviews later the panel finds out the candidate has never done the job the role actually is. That's a month of everyone's time spent learning something a ten-minute screen should have caught.
At Bubble, I ran four concurrent IC searches plus a Director search. Over 1,700 candidates crossed my desk in nine months on the three IC roles alone. About 1,300 didn't survive the first pass; 436 earned a full structured read against the bar, and on the three largest roles my pre-screen verdict matched the final panel outcome 94 to 96 percent of the time. The recruiter ran first-round screens I never had to redo; three senior designers were hired, and the Director was in the seat before I left.
The number isn't luck. It's apparatus:
• Role bars that name the disqualifiers. What the role needs, what no amount of polish compensates for, and the order to check them in.
• Structured screens at every stage. Recruiter screen, hiring-manager screen, portfolio panel, design crit, with rubrics and advancement thresholds the panel can apply without me in the room.
• Calibration. A log of where the process got it wrong and why, so the bar tightens over time instead of drifting with whoever interviewed last.
• Panel protocols for exec attendees. Where the VP sits in the loop, what they test, and how their read gets weighed against the panel's.
• 30-day onboarding plans for each hire, with pod relationships built in week one.
I also sat on PM loops as the design interviewer, because design's read on a PM candidate is signal the panel shouldn't lose.
Build the Product design people system
A design team without a ladder runs on vibes. Titles drift, reviews are a manager's mood, and every hire is negotiated from scratch because nobody wrote down what Senior means here.
I write the ladder and everything that hangs off it: level definitions by scope, autonomy, and influence; a job description and hiring process per level; a performance evaluation format managers can run without me; and a hiring plan sequenced against the product roadmap and the engineering plan, so design grows in step instead of behind.
I built this from scratch at Sigma and rebuilt it at Bubble. The ladder is the same DNA every hiring manager in this profession uses; what changes per company is the scope at each rung.
Make research something the whole team can run
Research at most startups is a tool subscription and a Slack channel. The power users answer every survey. The PMs who know a researcher get studies; the rest guess. Incentives come out of someone's corporate card.
I set up research operations: platform selection, recruiting workflows, participant sourcing, incentive budgets, consent, templates. The goal is PMs and designers running their own studies on a shared system, not a research team as a bottleneck.
I have working relationships at Maze, User Interviews, Listen Labs, Great Question, Voice Panel, Rally, and Figma. That means pilots and pricing conversations that start on week one, not after a month of demos, and a straight answer on which tools will still be worth paying for next year.
At Bubble I ran the vendor evaluation (Maze, Rally, Listen Labs, Great Question, UserTesting), moved the company onto Maze with 50 studies budgeted for the year, built three recruiting workflows for moderated, unmoderated, and external-panel studies, partnered with Data Science to segment participants so power users stop drowning out everyone else, and stood up a quarterly new-user study any PM can own.
I Leave Behind a function that runs without me
The measure of an interim engagement is what's true the week after it ends. Everything I build is documented for the person inheriting it: the career ladder, job descriptions and hiring process per level, performance evaluations, the hiring plan, a dossier on every designer, org state of play, the hiring apparatus, research operations, tool ownership and billing. The permanent leader gets a system, not a set of habits that lived in my head.
How an engagement works
Scoped, then scaled down. Full-time while the function needs it. Part-time with named ownership (hiring, vendors, a specific project) as the team stabilizes. A set exit date from day one.
Ownership, not advice. I make the calls a design leader makes: assignments, hires, tool contracts, tradeoffs. You get a leader, not a recommendation memo.
Handoff is the deliverable. From the first week, I'm writing for my successor. If the permanent hire is already in the pipeline, I'll help close them and overlap with them.
AI-native by default. I bring my own AI tooling for hiring analysis, research synthesis, and documentation, calibrated to your company; you keep everything it produces, plus the process rules that keep designers thinking instead of prompting. The tooling itself stays mine.
Who this is for
Who this is for
• Series A through C companies with a product team and no design leader.
• A CPO or VP Product who owns design and would rather not.
• A company between design leaders, with a search underway or about to start. I'll hold the seat, run the search, and close the hire; at Bubble all three happened inside one engagement.
• A design team that needs hiring, research, or process fixed before a permanent leader arrives.
• A team with a performance problem everyone knows about and nobody has named.
What changes when I start: your CPO stops being the acting design leader, and your board stops asking about the empty seat.
Who this is Not for
Agencies looking for a product designer, or companies that want a design leader without the authority to lead.
Have a design function that needs a leader?
Contact Me
©️ 2026, Julie Lynn Lemieux
what people are saying
Bill Palombi
VP of Product @ Prefect.io
As a product leader without a strong design background, I had a couple of false starts in establishing the design function at our growth stage startup. Julie's coaching was instrumental in re-establishing our design organization. She helped me define the core competencies we needed, establish a robust hiring process, and identify key signals of talent in portfolios and interviews. Her guidance was crucial in setting me and my initial design hires up for success as we drove our product's next phase of growth.
Rob Woolen
CTO / Co-founder at Sigma Computing
Julie was Sigma’s founding design leader, joining at inception and helping scale the company from zero to $50M in annual recurring revenue. She built the design function from the ground up—establishing the team, defining the process, and ensuring design scaled in step with the business. Julie’s leadership transformed design into a competitive advantage: she aligned product vision with user needs, created clear standards that empowered cross‑functional teams to move fast, and embedded design into the company’s growth engine. The result was a design culture and practice that produced products customers loved while directly fueling Sigma’s rapid expansion.