How I lead

Design leadership is a
people practice

Across 10+ years of design leadership I have hired, coached, and led designers through growth, acquisition, international distribution, and reductions. The products are elsewhere on this site. This page is about the teams.

Teams I have led

TubeBuddy / BENlabs

Aug 2021 – 2026

Embedded across 8 product teams

One product designer in each team

+1

UX researcher

The company’s first research hire

8product designers

Plus the company's first UX researcher, whom I hired. Each designer embedded on a different product team rather than pooled in a services model.

LogMeIn / Jive (now GoTo)

Jan 2014 – Aug 2021

One design team across seven locations World map highlighting the United States, Canada, Brazil and Hungary. Team locations were Utah, Boston, California, Montreal, Quebec, Brazil and Hungary. Countries are highlighted; no exact office locations are implied. Canada United States Brazil Hungary
United States
Utah, Boston, California
Canada
Montreal, Quebec
Brazil
Hungary

12+designers, seven locations

Progressed from Senior UX Designer to team and department leadership. My later team spanned Utah, Boston, Montreal, Quebec, Brazil, Hungary, and California, plus designers from other teams during consolidation. Four products spanning web, mobile, admin, call-center, and conference-room experiences.

Qualtrics

Sep 2012 – Jan 2014

One hybrid team

Design
Frontend

Custom experiences for

5designers & frontend engineers

A hybrid team building custom experiences for enterprise clients. I was the strongest frontend developer on the team at the time. That experience has shaped how I’ve led design teams and collaborated with engineers since.

Growing people

230+ UX professionals mentored through the DevMountain program, plus every designer I have managed. The measure of it is where they went next.

230+

mentored through Utah’s first UX bootcamp — now at Adobe, Amazon, Qualtrics, Square, and dozens of startups

“Britton has a rare ability to lead through ambiguity with both clarity and empathy. … As a mentor, Britton invested deeply in my growth. …”

I hired Tyler McGinnis at Qualtrics and taught him CSS and design. He went on to become a well-known frontend educator. He also helped me see more opportunity in my own career, inspiring me to pursue additional formal instruction and ask for bigger opportunities.

“Britton is a great teacher, mentor, and friend. He cares for the success of those he leads… He asks for criticism, keeps an open mind, and leads with confidence.”

From my onboarding notes

Making room to contribute

  1. 30 days

    Understand org/process
    Build rapport
    Contribute to a feature

  2. 60 days

    Understand the products
    Build relationships
    Contribute to process

  3. 90 days

    Understand customers
    Build deep trust
    Contribute to strategy

Excerpt from the onboarding template

Advocacy is part of the job

Parental leave

The policy changed
company-wide.

A strong candidate was pregnant, and our parental leave policy fell short. We were at risk of losing her. For me, this also raised a bigger concern: policies like ours can hold women back in their careers. I couldn’t feel good about our company being part of that problem.

I initiated the request for a better parental leave policy. HR was delighted I’d raised it, and the CEO agreed. My advocacy set the company-wide policy change in motion.

How I hire

I hired most of my own team at LogMeIn, and every designer at BEN. The process is where a team’s values are actually set.

No unpaid design assignments

Spec work filters for who can afford to do it, not who is good. I evaluate real past work and think through problems together in the room instead. Candidates called it “the best hiring process they have ever experienced.”

Hire for the gap, not the clone

At BEN that meant hiring the company’s first UX researcher instead of another designer. We all did research, myself included — but a dedicated researcher meant we could go deeper, and take on the studies that were hard to justify against everyone’s shipping time.

Own design hiring end to end

At BEN I ran design hiring from writing the role through the final offer. At LogMeIn I sat on the design hiring council and the broader design promotion committee — which is how you learn what “senior” actually means in a company, instead of drifting into a private standard.

Beyond my own team

Org-level leadership is the work that makes a design organization better whether or not you are in the room.

Design hiring, end to end

At BEN I owned the design hiring process — writing the role, sourcing, interviewing, and closing. At LogMeIn I sat on the design hiring council, interviewing designers for teams other than my own.

Promotion evaluation

Sat on the promotion evaluation committee for the broader design organization at LogMeIn — reviewing cases and advocating for designers who did not report to me.

Accessibility Champions

I helped found Accessibility Champions with Meg and Wendy — a cross-team program that made accessibility a shared, ongoing practice.

Design systems advocacy

On the design system review team, I advocated for dedicated resources. That work and the Accessibility Champions program helped strengthen our design system guild and establish a small team: a couple of dedicated people, with others contributing as bandwidth allowed. Some of my designers helped build it.

Dedicated people
Contributors as bandwidth allowed

From people I led

Verbatim excerpts from longer LinkedIn recommendations

“He's an exceptionally well spoken, emotionally intelligent design leader who's in tune with his team needs and helps remove roadblocks so we can do our best contributions. …”

“You can tell that he genuinely enjoys helping others improve their skillset and be successful. …”