CHRIS JACKSON - STRATEGIC DESIGN LEADERSHIP
Design Team Strategy
Workshops and advisory that help design leaders build a clear, shared strategy for how their team creates impact—sized to where you're starting from.
From $2,000 NZD · Workshops through to a full 3-month engagement
THE REAL PROBLEM
Most design team challenges are system challenges, not capability challenges.
You can have a highly talented team, strong leadership, and good intent, yet still end up with fragmentation, delivery pressure, and unclear strategic impact. Not because anything is "wrong" with the people, but because the team hasn't had space to build an explicit, shared strategy for how it operates and creates impact.
So what should feel like aligned strategic work becomes competing priorities, reactive delivery pressure, unclear decision-making, and inconsistent visibility of impact.
Over time, teams don't become less capable. They become less coherent.
What this looks like in practice.
You might recognise this:
Your team is capable, but not aligned on what “good” looks like
Design is brought in too late to meaningfully shape decisions
Delivery pressure crowds out strategic work
Priorities shift faster than the team can stabilise around them
Leadership lacks clarity on how the team is actually performing
Capability sits in individuals rather than in systems
When multiple of these are present, the constraint is no longer individual performance. It’s the operating system around the team.
What the design team strategy is.
Design Team Strategy is a set of workshops and advisory engagements that help Heads of Design build clarity on how their team operates, and a shared strategy for improving it — sized to what your team needs right now.
Futures Capability Workshop — $2,000–$5,000
A single workshop or short series building your team's capacity to think about change, uncertainty, and where design needs to head next. A low-commitment way to start working together.
Design Team Strategy — $10,000–$20,000
Workshops, and at the higher end, interviews with leadership and team members, to build a clear, co-designed strategy for how your team operates and creates impact.
Strategy Systemisation — from $20,000, 3-month engagement
For teams ready to go further: embedding the strategy into decision-making, prioritisation, and operating rhythms so it holds beyond the engagement. This is the full diagnostic-and-reset process previously offered as the Design Team Reset.
Most engagements start at the workshop level. Where there's a fit, they extend into deeper strategy and systemisation work as trust and budget allow.
HOW IT WORKS
The full systemisation engagement follows a four-stage structure over 3 months, adapted to your team's situation.
DIAGNOSE - WEEKS 1-3
We map how the team actually operates.This includes conversations with leadership, team members, and key stakeholders to understand:
where friction is emerging
how decisions are currently made
and what assumptions are shaping behaviour.
DESIGN - WEEKS 4-6
We identify the highest-leverage system changes. This may include:
decision-making structures
prioritisation rhythms
operating clarity between leadership and team
and strategic alignment mechanisms.
DELIVER - WEEKS 7-9
We work through implementation in real conditions. Not in theory, but inside actual organisational constraints.
DEVELOP - WEEKS 10-12
We embed new ways of working so they persist beyond the engagement.
The goal is not dependency. It is operational clarity the team can sustain independently.
WHAT YOU GET
Everything Included.
At the workshop level: a facilitated session or short series, practical tools your team can use immediately, and a summary of key insights and next steps.
At the strategy and systemisation level: everything opposite, plus a structured diagnostic of how your team operates, co-designed interventions, leadership alignment on direction and expectations, and a documented system your team can continue to use independently.
THE DESIGN TEAM RESET
Real examples of this work.
The Design Team Reset works whether your team needs resetting or building.
Major NZ bank · Strategy Realingment
Culture reset and redirection for a design team of 40
Reframed how a 40-person design function aligned on priorities, reducing internal friction and clarifying strategic direction across leadership layers.
Regional Council · Capability Building
Building a service design team from the ground up
Built a service design capability from inception to organisation-wide delivery maturity over three years.
WHAT CLIENTS SAY
In their words.
“Chris’s involvement acted as a positive circuit breaker, enabling us to take immediate steps towards reshaping a better future of the practice, shifting mindset, and uplifting our eNPS engagement score by 150%.”
“Chris is the ideal partner for those looking to change or build new business units, especially in complex organisations. ”
“It meant I could participate instead of facilitate, and it meant we ended up with a neutral space where our values felt emergent rather than directed.”
FIT
Who this is for…
Good starting points:
A single workshop, if you want a low-commitment way to build your team's capability around a specific challenge
Design Team Strategy, if you're ready to build a clear, shared strategy for how your team operates
Strategy Systemisation, if you already have clarity on the problem and want it embedded into how the team runs
This works best if you lead a design team inside a complex organisation and sense your team is capable of more than it's currently delivering.
The investment.
Workshops from $2,000 · Strategy engagements from $10,000 · Full systemisation from $20,000, 3-month structured engagement, limited to 2–3 teams at a time.
The cost of misalignment in a design team is almost always higher than the cost of addressing it.
Starting point.
If you're not sure where to start, book a short conversation—no pitch, no proposal.
Just an honest read on whether a workshop, a strategy engagement, or the full systemisation process fits where your team is right now.
If you want a quick start, I’ll work with you to unpack your Design Team Health Check and identify where you can make an immediate difference to your team.