Leading & mentoring designers

NetBramha Studios · ~3 years · Senior UX Designer · People management & mentorship

The NetBramha and JioMart teams, drawn as a farewell piece when I left.

Impact

• Three promotions I was responsible for. Both my mentees and one more designer on my JioMart team were promoted to Associate Senior UX Designer during the time I led them.
• An underperformer turnaround that held. The client lead wanted him off the project a year and a half ago. He's still on it today. The development structure and the coaching worked.

The shape of what I led

NetBramha is a design studio. For close to my first two years there, I was mentoring and leading informally, before any title said so. That informal leadership is what earned me the promotion to Associate Senior UX Designer, where I formally took on two mentees. A second promotion, to Senior UX Designer, came with a five-person team on the JioMart engagement.

On JioMart, we worked as contract product designers alongside the client's in-house design organisation, which had its own leads and a design director. The studio-side designers were mine: their work, their growth, their problems, all of it was my responsibility to handle.

How I ran mentorship

For my two mentees, the work was steady and personal:

• Continuous 1:1s. Not status check-ins. The goal was helping them surface their own problem areas rather than me just pointing at weaknesses. People improve faster on problems they've recognised themselves.
• Sessions where I could run them. Skill-building, whenever it was in my control to organise.
• I made the two of them friends. Deliberately. A mentee pair that trusts each other functions as a team and supports each other when I'm not in the room. A small move with a long tail.

How I ran the team

The five-person JioMart team was more hands-on, because I was in the project with them day to day.

• Mixed disciplines. Research, visual design, UX, across both the B2C and seller side of JioMart. Different crafts, different review needs.
• Regular reviews of everyone's work, on a steady cadence rather than ad hoc.
• 1:1s with each of them. And as a team, regular 1:1s with the studio's design lead, so the support structure ran both through me and around me.
• Pushed them to think on their own feet. The aim was a team that brought me decisions to pressure-test, not a team waiting to be told what to do.

The deep dive: turning around an underperformer

The hardest and most instructive piece of people leadership I did at NetBramha.

One designer on my team was consistently underperforming. I learned only later that he'd been on a PIP before he joined my team. He also had real friction with the client-side leads.

I treated it as a problem to solve, not a person to write off.

Built a structure around him. He had a mentor on the studio side. I connected with that mentor and we developed a plan together: weekly UI challenges the mentor would set, while I gave him progressively more project tasks to gauge where his performance actually was.

Mediated the relationship that was breaking. The client lead was deeply unhappy, but couldn't have the direct conversation, and couldn't bring himself to tell the studio to let the designer go. So I sat the two of them down together and acted as the mediator.

Diagnosed the real problems, which weren't "he's a bad designer":

• The client lead's feedback wasn't landing. Mine was pointed and easy to act on; theirs wasn't getting through. The designer was working from feedback he couldn't actually use.
• He couldn't deliver on time.

Coached him on the fixable parts. On time management: scope to the time you actually have, build in a buffer, and deliver what you promised within the time you promised. Concrete and repeatable, not abstract.

Set up the handoff. When a new senior designer was coming up, I briefed them directly on the situation: here's the problem, here's what's been tried, here's how you keep helping him. The support didn't depend on me staying in the seat.

The outcome. A year and a half ago, the client lead wanted him off the project. He's still on it today. The structure held, and so did he.

What I took from it

• Underperformance is usually a system, not a person. Feedback that doesn't land, unrealistic timelines, a mismatch nobody named out loud. Diagnose before you judge.
• Sometimes the most useful thing a lead does is mediate. The client lead and the designer both needed the conversation and neither could start it. Being the person who can hold that room is leadership.
• Good feedback is pointed and actionable. If a designer can't act on the feedback they're given, that's the feedback's failure, not theirs. I watched that play out directly here.
• Leadership has to outlast you. Briefing the next senior designer mattered as much as anything I did in the moment.