Tags: Org Design · Cross-functional Leadership · SEO/SEM · DesignOps
Context: BOLD (Zety), 2022-2026
Type: Design Leadership
BOLD operated across multiple brands and international markets, each requiring landing pages for organic search and paid acquisition. The design work for these pages was scattered: no dedicated team, no consistent process, no clear ownership between design, SEO and engineering.
This created predictable friction. Landing page changes moved slowly. SEO needs competed with product priorities. The collaboration between design, SEO specialists and the web engineering team had no shared language or workflow.
I identified this as a structural gap, not a resourcing problem. The root cause was not a shortage of designers but a missing layer of coordination: SEO was commissioning work directly from individual developers, which meant each landing page grew independently with its own components, grid systems, assets, styles and structure. There was no shared visual language, no Design System for SEO pages, and no single team accountable for the quality of the whole. The solution was not to add a designer to an existing team. It was to build a dedicated function from scratch, one that would work directly with SEO, standardise the output, and build the missing Design System alongside the work.
I designed and built the Top-of-Funnel Team as a new organisational unit: defined its scope, recruited and developed its leader, established the cross-departmental processes, and set the strategic direction for how design would contribute to organic and paid acquisition.
The ToF Team's remit was specific: landing page quality and design for SEO and SEM across multiple brands and markets. Not a general-purpose design squad. A focused function with a clear mandate.
This clarity of scope was intentional. A team that tries to serve everything serves nothing well. Defining what the ToF Team was responsible for also made it clear what it was not responsible for, which protected both the team's focus and the other squads' autonomy.
I identified Bohdan Kirff as the right person to lead the ToF Team. He was an individual contributor at the time. Over the course of building the team, I worked closely with him on every dimension of the leadership role: running team sessions, defining priorities, establishing cross-departmental relationships, conflict resolution, and capacity planning.
The first two months were the hardest part of the whole initiative. Getting three departments that had never worked together in a structured way to adopt a shared process required far more negotiation, iteration and adjustment than the original plan had anticipated. Initial agreements broke down in practice, handoff standards had to be rewritten, and the cooperation model ended up looking very different from what we had sketched at the start. What eventually worked was developed by the teams themselves through the process of trying and failing, not handed down from a plan. The goal remained clear throughout. The path to it was rebuilt almost entirely from scratch.
Within two months the team was fully operational. Bohdan was leading independently: documenting priorities, running the roadmap, onboarding new members, and managing stakeholder relationships with SEO, web engineering and QA without my direct involvement.