Keen: Leading without the title
Growth design, design systems and informal team leadership in parallel.
Role: Senior UX Designer, Acting Lead
Company: Keen.com
Tools: Figma, Jira, Adobe CC, Storybook, Zoom
About Keen
- Keen.com is a high-traffic marketplace that connects users with spiritual advisors for live phone and chat sessions. The platform’s value depends on the trust between users and the advisors they choose, and the product organization is structured into pods (growth, acquisition, research) that work independently and occasionally collaborate.
The Team I Stepped Into
- Keen’s design team was six designers organized across pods, led by a UX Director. When I joined, 70% of the team had never worked with a design system or component library. Half were junior or entry level, and the team had recently moved to Figma but was still developing fluency with the tool.
- There was no shared design infrastructure, no published library, and no common standard for how design decisions got made.
A Role That Kept On Growing
I was hired as the Senior UX Designer for the Growth Pod. Soon after my onboarding, the UX Director asked me to lead the design system initiative in parallel. A graphic designer already on the team was brought into the DS work, and training him became part of my scope too. Over time, other designers started coming to me for guidance and design reviews at the UX Director’s suggestion.
The scope became visible in the numbers. While my teammates carried one or two sprint tasks, I was regularly managing up to five. While they had one to three weekly meetings, I was in four to six hours of meetings most days across my pod, the DS initiative, and the broader design team.
Informal Authority In Practice
When designers needed a second opinion or were presenting new work, the UX Director brought me in to evaluate consistency with Clarity and push back where needed. Over time, three patterns defined how I worked with the team:
- • Component and design reviews: pulled into presentations to evaluate new work against the system standard before it moved forward.
- • Ad-hoc guidance: designers reached out directly when stuck, usually a quick Zoom call, sometimes same-day.
- • Junior designer mentorship: structured sessions, text chats, and ad-hoc calls as he ramped into DS contribution work. He eventually shipped components and wrote documentation independently.
Growth pod:
Shipping What Mattered
Alongside the DS work and team responsibilities, I continued shipping growth pod work throughout my time at Keen.
Three initiatives stand out:
- • Best Match Revamp: Redesigned the advisor matching quiz flow, reducing cost per acquisition and increasing the First Billed Minute rate, Keen's core conversion metric.
- • Collision A/B Test: A cross-pod initiative with the acquisition team. I designed the variant that won. The winning design drove an 8% increase in user-to-advisor connections.
- • Keen Rewards Widget: Designed a rewards widget that brought the loyalty program to the surface for users who had been missing or ignoring it. The updated experience drove a 26% increase in spend and a 5% improvement in retention.
Outcomes
• 8% increase in user-to-advisor connections from the Collision A/B test, a cross-pod initiative with the acquisition team.
- • The Keen Rewards Widget surfaced a loyalty program users had been overlooking, driving a 26% increase in spend and a 5% improvement in retention.
• Reduced cost per acquisition on the Best Match Revamp, increasing Keen's First Billed Minute rate.
• Mentored a graphic designer who grew into a junior UX designer by the end of my tenure, contributing independently to the design system along the way.
• Operated as the team's informal design authority across pods, at the UX Director's direction, while holding three parallel roles.
- When I left, my scope was divided across three people.
What I Learned
Leading without the title taught me something specific about how I work. I don't lead through hierarchy or authority. I lead through the consistency of my standards and the quality of my judgment, and it turns out those things travel regardless of what your job title says.
At Keen, designers came to me because they trusted my read. The UX Director sent people my way because he trusted my standards. That trust was built through the work, not the role. My standards aren't personal preference. They come from genuinely caring whether the work serves the people using it, whether that's at a startup, an unknown business, or a large company. That's the kind of leadership I'd bring to any team.