Rey MungaiProduct designer
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Resources for design teams & leaders

Free · Five templates

Along my design journey, I've led design teams and built the systems underneath them: role ladders, QA processes, growth frameworks, and handover practices that hold up even when I'm not in the room. I'm sharing these because most of what makes a design team actually work never gets written down. It lives in one person's head until they leave, and then it leaves with them.

Download the Design Leadership Toolkit (.zip, 5 PDFs)

The first page of each of the five toolkit templates side by side: the Operating Handbook, Design QA Report, Growth Plan, Handover Template and Onboarding Quest.
The Design Leadership Toolkit: five templates.

Design maturity isn't a score. It's whether growth conversations, QA, onboarding, and offboarding all run off one shared model, instead of five people making five separate calls about what "good" means.

I built this set while leading a design team inside a fast-scaling company: a role ladder, a QA process, a growth framework, and an offboarding process, all tied to the same definition of design maturity. The QA process alone cut design-to-development rework by roughly 30% across four product squads. This is that underlying structure, not just the result.

What's included
01
The Design Team Operating Handbook
Defines design maturity, a six-level role ladder, and the five-phase process everything else in this set runs on.
02
Design QA Report Template
Turns "does this look right" into a checkable standard, reviewed before a feature ships instead of after engineering has already built against it.
03
Designer Growth Plan Template
A growth plan and a monthly readiness scorecard that read off the same six dimensions as the role ladder, so a promotion case isn't the first time anyone's compared notes.
04
Designer Handover Template
What a departure hands to the next person, instead of what it loses: ownership, open work, the reasoning behind past decisions, and known risk.
05
The Design Onboarding Quest
A four to five week path that gets a new designer to independent contribution on a repeatable structure, instead of however their buddy onboards them that week.

Want this applied to your team? Try Matrix.