Twenty projects, one practice

A consultancy full of engineers kept landing work that needed design. The fix wasn’t a hire, it was a practice.

The stuck thing

Room 5 was an engineering consultancy whose projects increasingly arrived with a design-shaped hole in them. Handling that piecemeal — a contractor here, an engineer’s best guess there — meant uneven quality, no shared philosophy, and no way to sell design as part of the offer. The company needed design as a discipline, not a patch.

The diagnosis

A practice isn’t a person, it’s structure. What was missing wasn’t talent but the machinery around it: a philosophy and service offering clients could actually buy, a seat at project inception — discovery, scoping, scheduling, resource allocation — instead of after the contract was signed, and people hired and mentored into a shared way of working with engineers rather than beside them.

Made it go

With the CEO, I created the design philosophy and service offering, then ran the practice: hired and mentored the team, consulted at the inception of projects, wrote the winning proposals, and led design across everything internal and external: DARPA, L3 Technologies, Micron, and InVue among twenty-plus projects, from augmented retail to laundromats, barbecues to sprinklers. The practice spanned and transformed all of them — which was the point.

practice building · team leadership · proposals & SOWs · client engagement

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