Creating Products That Connect: My Makeship Story
As the Head of Design,
I led the creative design team, balancing hands-on product design with executive-level strategy. My role involved leading cross-functional teams, defining product guidelines & workflows, and collaborating with sales and marketing to offer products that inspired communities. These efforts contributed to over 2000 launched products and over 1,000,000 product units shipped worldwide.
Building a Design Team That Thrives
At Makeship, I collaborated with stakeholders to create an onboarding system that fostered growth, clarity, and excellence. We streamlined hiring with clear job descriptions, structured pay bandings, grading rubrics, and design tests.
New hires joined a week-long onboarding program with self-guided learning, daily check-ins, and clear job lattice structures outlining growth paths. The result? A seamless onboarding experience that empowered designers to excel and elevated team performance.
Product Design for Speed, Quality, and Scalability
As Head of Design at Makeship, I balanced creative freedom and efficiency to scale our plush product offerings. By introducing a modular system with standardized shapes and customizable details, we ensured consistency while preserving creators' unique visions.
A reuse library, single-page templates, 2 QA process tests and collaboration with sales and manufacturing reduced the design cycle from 21 days to 2–5 for over half our clients.
17%
complexity
reduction
$750k
savings
Streamlining Design for Smarter Manufacturing
In 2023, I fostered collaboration between design and manufacturing, unlocking efficiencies that reduced product complexity by 17%, saving $0.85 per unit and forecasting $750K in annual savings for 2024.
This partnership produced resources like how-to guides and cost libraries that integrated manufacturing constraints into the design process. The result? A streamlined production pipeline, stronger team alignment, and a sustainable system ensuring quality and cost savings.
#98 on the Globe & Mail’s Canada’s Top Growing Companies 2024
Rakan - CEO & Founder, Makeship
“[Michael] built up our design function from scratch, hiring at least a dozen designers into the team. He created all the infrastructure required to operate an expert and efficient design team that produced product designs with a high degree of quality. Michael has strong design, leadership and organizational skills, is highly detail-oriented, and is very adept at producing a large amount of product designs from a graphical and technical standpoint.”
Liv - Designer, Makeship
“Michael’s leadership skills are outstanding and his contributions to the organization are invaluable. He is truly an inspiration and has set extremely high standards as to what being a great leader truly means. ”
Taylor - Head of Operations, Makeship
“[Michael] was intentional with creating alignment around projects by including relevant stakeholders early and understanding their needs and concerns before charging ahead with roll out. [It’s] refreshing to see Michael push initiatives that create alignment for frontline staff in order to expedite adoption of future projects.”