Bringing Clarity and Stability to a Team in Transition

When I stepped into the Chief of Staff role during a major organizational merger, the team I inherited was stretched thin and struggling to keep up. Multiple project portfolios had been combined, but staffing hadn’t caught up to the new workload. Designers were juggling too many priorities, morale was low, and no one had a clear sense of what was realistic or sustainable.

The Challenge
There was no single view of who was working on what, what each person’s strengths were, or how resources were distributed. Workloads were uneven, costs were unclear, and leadership didn’t have visibility into how budget and staffing decisions affected the team’s ability to deliver.

We needed a way to bring everything into focus, including people, projects, capacity, and cost, so we could make informed decisions and set the team up for success.

What I Did

I created a centralized operating model using the tools we already had in place, Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. I documented each team member’s core skills, reporting structure, location, and cost, then mapped every active project against staffing plans and budget forecasts.

Working closely with HR and Finance, I validated the data and kept it current as priorities shifted. I built simple, visual summaries that made it easy for leadership to see:

  • Which projects were fully staffed

  • Which projects lacked resources

  • The cost and complexity of each initiative

  • How much additional funding would be needed to take on more work

Most importantly, I partnered with leadership to build a single, consolidated roadmap that ranked our most important programs first. This became our shared source of truth, helping the team set realistic expectations, reduce overload, and focus on the work that mattered most.

The Outcome

This project brought more than clarity to leadership; it brought relief to the team. Designers who had been spread too thin finally had the focus and bandwidth to do their best work. Leadership gained clear, quarterly data to guide investment decisions and a reliable way to understand what it would cost to scale responsibly.

That clarity made a strong business case for additional funding. As a result, we secured $6.2 million in seed funding to support key growth initiatives. The investment led to the hiring of new roles and the creation of an innovation team that went on to shape future product design systems.