Rebuilding design critique from scratch

The problem

When I joined, design critique was a 90-minute weekly meeting where the loudest opinion in the room usually won. Junior designers stopped bringing early work because the cost of being wrong in front of the team was too high. Work was polished before it was ever critiqued — which meant the most expensive kind of feedback, the kind that changes direction, was arriving far too late to matter.

This is a placeholder case study. Replace this paragraph and the structure below with your actual story — the real problem, with real specifics about what was broken and why it mattered to the business, not just to designers.

What I changed

1. Async-first, written critique. Designers post work-in-progress with a specific question attached — not "thoughts?" but "I'm deciding between A and B, here's the tradeoff I see." This forces clarity before the room weighs in.
2. Explicit decision rights. Every project has a named decider. Critique informs the decision; it doesn't replace it. This killed the death-by-committee dynamic.
3. A 30-minute, biweekly live session reserved only for genuinely contested calls — not status updates.

What changed as a result

Replace this with your real before/after — in numbers if you have them, in concrete behavior change if you don't. "Junior designers now post 3x earlier in the process" is more convincing than any adjective.

What I'd do differently

A short, honest paragraph on what you'd change if you did it again. This is the line that separates a strategic leader from someone reciting a win — include it.