A new designer, a new challenge, at the same time
Madison joined my team in June 2025 as an entry-level Associate Product Designer, coming out of Lowe's Launchpad program — a career-training track with a path to hire for recent college graduates. Over her first year, she worked across a range of projects that built her familiarity with our UX design process, our design system, and the cross-organizational relationships every project here depends on. A year in, an opportunity opened up: extend Lowe's Lead Capture experience — already live for In-Home Sales Specialists (IHSS) and PROviders (third-party professional installers) on their own dedicated tools — to in-store associates and specialists, who needed their own version built for the sales floor, combining lead capture and appointment scheduling in one place. I saw it as the right project to grow her into, not just hand her.
Two things had to grow at once
This wasn't a simple onboarding. Madison needed to learn a genuinely complex, multi-stakeholder system she'd never touched, while designing a third version of an experience that already had two established siblings — meaning every decision she made needed to hold up next to patterns she didn't create. At the same time, Lowe's had just introduced a new hybrid designer/PM track, and Madison was one of the first designers into it — meaning her job wasn't only to design the thing, it was to own it end-to-end: stakeholder relationships, business alignment, and delivery, not just Figma files.
Teach the pattern, not the rule
Rather than handing Madison a style guide, I walked her through the existing IHSS and PROvider tools side-by-side before she designed anything — not so she'd copy them, but so she could see why each pattern existed, and start recognizing the difference between an established convention and an incidental one-off choice. That distinction became the foundation for every design call she'd go on to make independently.
Grow the person and the product at the same time
Because Madison's hybrid role meant she owned stakeholder relationships too, I didn't delegate the introductions — I co-attended her first conversations with store teams and business stakeholders so she could build trust with me still visibly in the room, then deliberately stepped back once those relationships were hers to carry. I stayed present just long enough for the relationship to become hers, not mine.
Every major flow got reviewed against the IHSS and PROvider versions together, not in isolation — training Madison to spot when a difference was an intentional pattern worth preserving versus an accidental inconsistency worth fixing, so she could make that call herself going forward. Just as important, I helped Madison build a habit of direct design collaboration with her peer Oliver French, who was building the IHSS and PROvider solutions in parallel — so her designs and workflow stayed aligned with his as both moved forward, not just reconciled after the fact.
Once the fundamentals were solid, I moved from making decisions to reviewing them — leaving the remaining design calls and the stakeholder work needed to reach pilot-ready in Madison's hands, staying available, not in charge.
Where things stand
Designs are complete and reviewed with partners; in-store testing is next, with 10 participants across 2 stores. Ahead of pilot launch, I've coached Madison directly on in-store user testing — how to structure a session, what to watch for, how to stay neutral — and connected her with our research team, so she has their support on test-plan writing and testing methodology suited to the results we're actually trying to learn from this pilot. Madison is now operating as a genuine design-PM hybrid on this project — owning stakeholder relationships and design decisions end-to-end, with me reviewing rather than directing.
Growing a person and a product don't happen on the same clock
The hardest part of this wasn't the design consistency work — it was resisting the urge to just decide things myself when it would have been faster. Coaching Madison to recognize a pattern versus a one-off, or to hold her own in a stakeholder conversation, only works if I actually let her sit in that discomfort instead of stepping in. The product was never really the hard part here. Knowing when to stay quiet was.