Leadership · Episode 01 of 6
I turned a Git repo into a team OS.
Work, OKRs, availability, AI skills, assets and team history in one shared workspace, so knowledge and work stay transferable across the team. Not five SaaS accounts, two of which nobody had opened since onboarding.
The problem was never a shortage of tools. Most design departments have plenty: tasks in one app, OKRs in a spreadsheet somebody owns, the domain map in a slide deck last touched at a planning offsite. None of that is wrong on its own. Together it means the answer to who owns this, and what did we decide? lives in four places and one person’s memory.
When I took over the twelve-person studio, I wanted one place where the department’s working knowledge lived. What I built instead of buying was a departmental dashboard on top of a git repository.
The obvious question: why not Jira, ClickUp or Trello?
The honest answer is that each of them models a way of working and asks you to adopt it. That is not a criticism; it is how a good product earns its keep, and for most teams the trade is worth it. It just meant that our six-field intake, the ownership matrix, the published turnaround bands and our OKR structure would each need heavy configuration, or would lose the parts that didn’t fit the template.
A repository holds no opinion about how a design department should run. That is why it could hold all of it at once.
What the repo holds
- Tasks and their intake records, as files, so a request and the reasoning behind it stay together.
- OKRs, in the same tree as the daily work, so a designer can see how today’s output moves a quarterly goal.
- The domain ownership matrix: primary owner, secondary, and me as the backstop.
- The team’s agent skills, versioned like anything else in the repository.
- A decision log, so a settled call doesn’t get re-litigated three months later.
Skills as committed artifacts
This is the part I did not plan for. The designers build small agent skills for the tasks they repeat: a naming pass, a resize batch, a first-draft layout. Left alone, those live in one person’s local setup and leave the building when they do.
Committed to the repository, they become an asset the whole department can pull, run and improve on. An hour someone spent automating their own tedium is now an hour saved eleven more times.
An unplanned side effect: engineering empathy
Running the workspace on git principles put our design workflow on roughly the same rails as our engineering partners’ release architecture. That was not a goal, but it gave us a shared technical vocabulary across departments, and we lean on it more than I expected to.
What it bought
The administrative saving was real, and also the least interesting part. The durable outcome was that the team stopped waiting for people. Because the operating context, the domain map and the agent skills are all committed and readable, anyone picking up unfamiliar work starts from a documented position rather than from a colleague’s memory.
That applies equally to a new hire in their first week and to a secondary owner covering an absence, which is the subject of the next episode.