Teaching design teams to run like a system.
"Workflow — Design Management" was a workshop I delivered at the Design Fair of the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina (IFSC), for Product Design students. It's built directly from how I ran design inside a marketing & design team at ACATE — coordinating designers through sprints and SLAs, and structuring the process well enough that the team could see, not just feel, the results of their own work.
Good design work disappears into "vibes" the moment nobody can see the process behind it.
Design teams often get judged on output alone — how a thing looks — while the actual bottleneck is upstream: unclear ownership, no shared sense of pace, no agreement on what "done" or "on time" even means. Sprints give a team rhythm; SLAs give it accountability. Neither is exciting on its own, but together they're what let a design team point at its own results instead of just hoping people notice the work.
From ad hoc requests to a running system
The session walked Product Design students through the actual mechanics of managing a design team's day-to-day — not theory, but the structure I used at ACATE.
Sprints
Giving the team a shared rhythm — a fixed cycle for planning, delivering, and reviewing work, instead of an endless stream of one-off requests.
SLAs
Setting clear, agreed turnaround expectations between design and the rest of the business — so "when will this be ready?" stops being a guess.
Process design
Mapping the workflow itself as a designed artefact — intake, prioritisation, handoff — so the team's process is as intentional as its output.
15 slides, from the actual workshop deck
Presented in the order shown on Behance — covering the sprint and SLA framework, team roles, and the reasoning behind each part of the process.
This is the clearest proof I have of design leadership, not just design output — running a team's actual day-to-day, and being able to teach that structure clearly enough for design students to take it and use it themselves. It's the difference between doing good design work and building the conditions for a team to do good design work repeatably.