Building the Design Org Leadership at Engageli & DarioHealth
- Companies
- Engageli · DarioHealth
- My role
- Head of Product Design
- Team
- Up to 16 (DarioHealth)
- Timeline
- 2022 – present
- The challenge
- Two very different leadership problems: building a design function from scratch at Engageli — while redesigning the whole platform and keeping the live product running — and unifying four global teams after acquisitions at DarioHealth.
- What I did
- Hired and coached the team, set up how design works with product and engineering, built and harmonized design systems, and made design part of roadmap decisions.
- Outcome
- A design function built from one freelancer to a global team · 130+ component web design system, plus a mobile library · seven DarioHealth products unified into one experience
Engageli — building from the ground up
When I joined Engageli in December 2022, design was done by a single freelancer, and the product’s UX/UI was weak. I had to do two things at once: keep improving the live product that universities and schools were using every day, and redesign the whole platform from zero. I set the product-wide UX vision for web and mobile, and built a team and a way of working to deliver both.
People
Hired and led a global team of 4, working remotely from Israel: 2 senior product designers, a UX researcher and a UX writer.
- Clear levels and a personal growth plan for every designer
- Hiring with a portfolio review, a design exercise and a team interview
- Weekly 1:1s and mentoring
Process & culture
Clear processes, a critique culture and close collaboration with product and engineering.
- Daily team meeting every morning
- Weekly design critique
- Research and usability testing as a routine
- Data-informed design decisions
Design system
A large, scalable design system: 130+ components in the web library alone — from buttons and inputs to AI loaders, live meters and classroom-specific parts like role tags — plus a separate mobile library. It gave design and engineering consistency, accessibility and faster development.
Strategy
The platform had many features — all of them important — but the UI had become crowded and hard to use. I kept every capability and redesigned how it was organized and shown, turning a heavy, complex interface into a simple, intuitive one that instructors and students could understand at a glance. On top of that, I defined dozens of new features built specifically for teaching online — like a classroom where the instructor sees the whole class and every virtual table at once, without leaving the live lesson. Simplicity without losing power became the guiding principle for the whole redesign.
At Engageli the whole team worked together across the entire platform, rather than being split into separate product squads — one shared view of the experience, end to end.
DarioHealth — unifying after acquisitions
DarioHealth had grown through acquisitions, and each product came with its own team and its own way of designing. I led the consolidation into one design organization and one experience.
One team across three countries
Consolidated and managed four UX/UI teams — 16 people in the US, India and Israel — and aligned their practices and workflows.
One experience across seven products
Unified the UX of seven products and two enterprise platforms for Sanofi and Aetna — across mobile, web and connected devices.
Strategy and roadmap
Defined design strategy, roadmaps and priorities at both the macro and the micro level, across acquired and core products.
Design system harmonization
Merged several design languages into one system for consistency, efficiency and long-term scale.
Results
- A real design function: from one freelancer to a global team of 4 at Engageli, with clear levels, rituals and a hiring process.
- One system, many teams: a 130+ component design system that design, product and engineering all build with.
- One experience after acquisitions: four teams in three countries and seven products brought together at DarioHealth.
- Design at the table: design became part of roadmap and strategy decisions, not a service at the end.
What I learned
Building a team and merging teams need opposite instincts. At Engageli the job was to create structure where there was none; at DarioHealth it was to respect what each team had already built while asking them to give some of it up. In both cases, a shared design system and a shared critique ritual did more for alignment than any org chart.
Hiring a design leader?
Let’s talk about how I can help your team.