How a series of design thinking-powered workshops that transformed vague and ambitious ideas into an actionable roadmap, already benefitting dozens of students in the first 4 months.
Preamble: Lessons in Design Leadership
At Config in 2024, I heard NASA's Joyce Croft speak about how designers can be like therapists to our stakeholders—listening intently to understand people's perspectives, translating everyone's jargon into a language or visual everyone can understand, and making sure everyone is comfortable with the new direction. I never resonated with that more than when I found myself in a room with 6 highly opinionated people trying to make the best nonprofit they could. Working at Patina Network has taught me when and how to push, put my foot down as a leader, be compassionate and nurturing, and let things go. I hope you enjoy reading and check out our website!
Overview
Patina Network is a nonprofit started by a group of friends and colleagues providing everything we wished we had in our formative years: tips from industry insiders, validation that finding your path is hard, and just a group of supporters that accept you for who you are. We focus on supporting AANHPI women.
In our first 16 months, we have run 3 mentorship pair programs, recruited 20+ volunteers, and raised $24,000+ to fund 2 scholarships and run 22+ community events.
My role
Co-founder and Board of Directors: Collect Board input using various user research methods and facilitate workshops to align on everything from our mission statement to the resource distribution.
Executive Director: Delegate and maintain velocity on tasks based on Board goals and priorities to a team of 20+ volunteers in 15+ workstreams.
VP of Marketing: Lead a design team of 3 to produce branding materials, external communications, and social media strategy in line with a brand identity I created from scratch.
VP of Tech: Mentored a student to design our website and oversaw a team of engineers to code it from scratch. It currently gets a few dozen page views per day.
Mentorship Coordinator: I designed a 10-week program to help students achieve their goals. Lead a team to recruit, interview, and paired 24-30 mentors/mentees twice a year.
Workshop facilitation
Surveys
Brand design
Service design
In the beginning, there was chaos
As expected for a passion project, we started out with a whole lot of ideas and excitement, and not a lot of direction-choosing. Choosing a path is scary, because it feels like by choosing one thing you're giving up another. But design leaders will be the first to remind you that everything is a prototype.
As the Executive Director, it was difficult to know which workstreams to prioritize, or how to justify pulling resources from one initiative to support another. We each had our own reasons for caring deeply about the mission. Some people were more interested in the professional development aspect, and while others were motivated by community. But without a shared vision of success, we risked fragmented public messaging, duplication of effort, and a team unsure where their work was leading.
After several arduous derailments of meetings to debate this topic, I knew I had to do something to help.
How to use design thinking on your friends
Observing the dynamic of the group, I knew that outspoken people overtaking the more quiet ones would be a risk. I chose to send out a survey to mitigate that risk and to break this complex and big question (what is the direction of Patina) into smaller chunks to diagnose where the biggest misalignments were. After carefully analyzing the responses, I synthesized the results into a short document outlining the top risks and action items.
View the full report here
The top 3 near-term priorities for the board were:
Mentorship program
Scholarship program
Community and network building
The divides also became clear:
Is focusing on supporting AANHPI women more important than fostering allyship?
Do we want to be more structured and have distinct division of labor, or be more grassroots and have people help out when the can and want to?
After this, we were able to focus intentional discussion to set expectations specifically on these two topics and move forward even with some ambiguity.
Making things more tangible
With a shared direction emerging, our next challenge was operationalizing it. What does our vision look like in practice? How do we communicate it, align efforts to it, and measure progress?
I proposed a 4-hour in-person working session and facilitated it using UX-inspired methods: silent brainstorming, anonymous vision critique, affinity mapping, and card sorting. These activities helped surface honest perspectives and prevent dominant voices from taking over. Each had a clear goal and timebox, which helped us focus while also capturing open questions for later. Together, we tackled:
What is our vision statement?
What are our goals for this year?
Does our programming reflect those goals?
By the end of the session, we:
Aligned on key themes and guardrails for our vision statement, which enabled a final vote weeks later
Clarified which initiatives needed more investment to meaningfully support our vision, which were already on track, and which needed deprioritizing
Created a shared framework for evaluating future programming proposals
This moment marked a turning point: we had a direction, a shared mental model, some momentum, and the shared memory of laughing over my selection of cat stickers over takeout Chinese food for lunch.
Building the right systems
With our goals clarified, I focused on setting up foundational systems to help us act intentionally, not reactively. Our top near-term priority—growing and strengthening our community—needed better infrastructure and clarity.
I mapped out our funnel two ways.
First, a service model diagram to illustrate how each of our member touchpoints would work together in a linear flow.
Second, a mess of a spaghetti flowchart to visualize dependencies.
These maps revealed two critical infrastructure needs:
A seamless website → intake form → database pipeline to personalize outreach and track interest
A community partnerships initiative to deepen our local presence and multiply recruiting impact
With buy-in from the board, we launched both workstreams—the first time our initiatives were proactively scoped instead of retrofitted.
In order to balance workstream tracking with efficient use of time, I set up two weekly standups:
internal ops (finance, legal, tech)
external workstreams (programs, events, community, marketing)
Each squad sent a rotating rep to share updates and unblock issues. This lightweight structure has helped us track progress across 15+ workstreams, promote accountability, and ensure no team works in isolation.
Outcomes and early impact
It took patience and iteration, but the systems we put in place have already started to transform Patina into the kind of community we envisioned.
Strategic alignment helped us say "no"
We now evaluate ideas based on mission fit and timing. For example, although our board is excited about a future paid membership model, we aligned on postponing it—our top goal right now is to grow the community without barriers to entry.
Improved volunteer retention through clarity and consistency
Constantly shifting meetings and responsibilities made it hard to retain volunteers in the past. Adding recurring meetings to keep people accountable for updates, and also making it easier for them to understand how their work fits into our mission has increased volunteer morale.
More events!
With a solid group of people planning events every month, we've going from "oh crap we need to plan an event this month" to planning events a month or more in advance. A larger and more engaged group also means more variety of ideas.
Reports from the Chair indicate that the Board members are very satisfied with the momentum we've picked up. Here's a glimpse into the 3 mentorship cohorts, 22+ community events, and lively Discord group of over 150 members.
What's next?
It took patience and iteration, but the systems we put in place have already started to transform Patina into the kind of community we envisioned.
Building smarter infrastructure for onboarding and partnerships
We’re implementing a CRM to finally close the loop between our website, intake forms, and community database. This will help us track interest, automate touchpoints, and personalize engagement. We’ve also initiated partnerships with 5+ local AANHPI orgs to co-host events and expand our reach.
Defining and measuring impact
We're developing lightweight feedback systems to understand what our community truly needs—beyond just the mentorship program. That includes event surveys, funnel tracking, and metrics around engagement, retention, and who we're reaching. Our goal: to work smarter and serve our mission with focus.
Evolving our brand
Our understanding of the org we want to build has grown. With this turning point of scaling up our presence in the local community, we have an opportunity to tighten our brand identity to better match our warm, grassroots vibe.
Reflection: What it means to be design-led
I’ve always believed that anyone can learn design—watch a few Figma tutorials, study great interfaces, and you’ll be halfway decent at it in a few weeks.
But what makes UX design shine in leadership is its ability to make complex things feel possible. It’s listening deeply, untangling ambiguity with care, and framing challenges in ways others can engage with. To recognize that your experiences are not everyone else's, and that each problem requires a unique, thoughtful (prototype of a) solution.
Working with Patina reminded me that design isn’t just about craft. It’s about adaptability, empathy, and people.
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Design is a conversation. Let's have one!
celinathedesigner@gmail.com