Design‑org evaluation

Your design team delivers every week. The output looks fine. What you cannot tell, from inside, is whether the team can keep up with where your company is going, or whether you are one senior hire away from the same problem with a bigger salary attached.

Most reviews cannot see the capability either. An internal one marks its own homework. A big-consultancy audit hands you a roadmap. The team that wrote it is gone before anything on it starts, and the score underneath measures you against an industry average. So the decision is made on instinct, the money follows a guess about what is wrong, and the gap outlives the spend.

I read a design org against your company’s ambition, strategy and vision: whether the capability can deliver them. The method is my own, built at scale. At Philips it made experience coherence settable and measurable across a €3.9B consumer business, and I taught it to teams worldwide. I bring that discipline to your org as a straight outside read.

You get a written read: where the capability sits across all four layers, what is missing, what the gaps are costing you, and the order in which to fix them. Enough to make the next investment with confidence, and to defend it to your board.

Capability gaps can be due to how well the design team is integrated with the rest of the organisation. They can come down to how the organisation briefs the work, measures it, or acts on it. The read will clarify this.

What comes next depends on what the read finds. Sometimes it is the senior hire, with a role you can now specify. Sometimes the difference was never decided at the top: that is Decide the difference. Sometimes the difference is decided and the delivery leaks: that is Make it hold. Where the gap is standing design leadership, that is the seat.

For investors sizing up a portfolio company, the same read runs as design due diligence.