Work
My work weaves strategy, storytelling, design, insight, collaboration, and impact.
My work weaves strategy, storytelling, design, insight, collaboration, and impact. These case studies show how I help teams build what matters most through design, mentorship, learning experiences, and outcomes that last.
Recent Work
Program Development
Mentorship
Leadership
Design Leadership
Mentoring the next generation of designers to lead with craft
How I scaled an experiment-driven model for product design education, putting instructors in the driver's seat of continuous curriculum improvement.
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Instructors trained and onboarded to the DRI-driven curriculum model
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Leading a distributed faculty team, each instructor owning program outcomes
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Practice leads driving continuous curriculum updates across the design program
CONTEXT
Education moves slow. Industry keeps moving anyway.
The thing that keeps me up at night isn't whether the design is good. It's whether the people teaching it are still growing. That question is what this work is really about.
Design education has a fundamental velocity problem. Traditional curriculum governance, committees, approval cycles, annual reviews, operates on an academic timeline that industry stopped respecting years ago. By the time a program update ships, the skills students needed have already shifted.
GA's model gave us an advantage: a practitioner-led faculty and short cohort cycles. The question was whether we could build on that foundation to create something genuinely different, a program that learns in near real-time, not in retrospect.
Practice
Hands-on
FRICTION MOMENT
The model came together. The people took longer.
The hardest part wasn't building the model. It was convincing a team of experienced practitioners that the way they'd always done it wasn't the ceiling. Some instructors pushed back hard. A few never fully bought in. That resistance taught me more about change management than any framework I've read. What it produced was a team that owned the work in a way they never had before.
WHAT WE BUILT
A three-level product: program, practice, and curriculum
The work operates at three distinct levels, each one a layer of the product. Together they form a living system that evolves with the industry rather than chasing it. Each level informs the next, and no single layer works without the others holding it up.
Real-world
Transfer
OPERATING MODEL
A product delivery loop for learning experience design
Every curriculum change runs through the same product-style loop, keeping improvements small, visible, and evidence-backed. The model scales from micro-fixes to macro program overhauls. Nothing ships without signal behind it.
Industry Transfer
Live Experiments
OUTCOMES
What this model made possible
Every curriculum change runs through the same product-style loop — keeping improvements small, visible, and evidence-backed. The model scales from micro-fixes to macro program overhauls.
What I'm proudest of here isn't the 91%. It's that we built a team that now questions the curriculum before I have to ask them to.
The program that ships the most relevant skills earns its place. We built the operating model to stay ahead of that bar.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
Learning
Learning Experience
Infusing AI-fluency into the DNA of emerging product designers
How I redesigned GA's product design curriculum from the ground up — moving AI from a topic students encounter to a native capability they graduate with.
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Graduate employment within 180 days — sustained across cohorts
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Running a continuous, product-style delivery model for curriculum
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Curriculum improvements shipped and validated through the model
CONTEXT
AI is not a feature of design education. It's the new foundation.
I've watched a lot of design programs respond to AI by adding a module and calling it progress. I couldn't live with that answer.
For years, GA's product design program succeeded by doing one thing well: preparing career changers for the industry through applied, experiential learning. The hypothesis was simple, treat the student as the user, build the curriculum like a product, and iterate relentlessly. That model delivered a 91% outcomes rate and produced designers who could walk into industry-ready roles.
Then the ground shifted. AI moved from a tool designers might occasionally use to a capability the best ones think with natively. The curriculum had a choice: treat AI as a topic to introduce, or rebuild around it as a foundational lens. We chose the latter.
Activation
STRATEGIC FRAMING
From AI-aware to AI-fluent: a different design identity
Most programs respond to AI by adding a module. We asked a harder question: what does it mean to graduate a designer who has AI-fluency in their DNA, not as a skill they learned, but as a way they think?
That reframe changed how we approached every unit, project brief, feedback method, and assessment. We weren't patching a curriculum. We were rebuilding the identity of what a GA graduate is.
Native Practice
Confidence
AI-fluency isn't a module. It's the mindset we build the entire program around.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
Collaboration
Delivery
FRICTION MOMENT
Development goes both ways.
The faculty development piece was harder than the curriculum redesign. Asking experienced instructors to publicly practice something they hadn't mastered yet required a level of psychological safety we had to build before we could ask for it. Some weeks the energy in the room felt more like resistance than readiness. We kept going anyway.
DESIGN APPROACH
Six tenets of an AI-native learning experience
The redesign was grounded in the same operating principle we'd used for years — treat the student as the user, the curriculum as the product. These six tenets defined what an AI-native learning experience actually looks like in practice.
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Fluency over familiarity
Students learn to think with AI, not just use it, building judgment, not just technique.
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The classroom as a laboratory
Every cohort is a live experiment. Instructors test new AI-integrated methods and report back.
OUTCOMES
What the redesign produced
The redesign will need to happen again in two years. That's not a failure — it's proof the model is working.
Foundation
Fluency
The designers who will lead the next decade are the ones who learned to think with AI from day one, not study it from a distance.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
Teaming
Ecological Teaming
Building ecologically inspired product design teams of the future
How I developed a framework and program for designing product teams that operate less like org charts and more like living systems, with distributed ownership, clear accountability, and the adaptive capacity to evolve.
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Designers developed through Forthward cohort sessions across both career stages
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Forthward running as an independent laboratory for ecological teaming practice
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Distinct program tracks built and validated across cohort formats and archetypes
CONTEXT
The hierarchy has limits. The org chart was never designed for how the best teams actually function.
I've never been comfortable with the way most design teams are structured. Too hierarchical to move fast, too siloed to build trust, too focused on reporting lines to develop real ownership. I started building an alternative.
The dominant model for product design teams, hierarchical, role-siloed, top-down, was designed for a different era. It assumes predictability, clear chain of command, and work that flows in one direction. None of those assumptions hold in a fast-moving product environment where designers are expected to lead through influence, make calls without permission, and collaborate across functions that don't report to the same person.
The designers I've worked with through GA and Forthward have consistently surfaced the same friction: they have the craft, but lack the structural vocabulary to understand how healthy, flat, high-trust teams operate and how to find their footing and authority within them. That gap is exactly what this framework was built to close.
Distributed
Peer-2-Peer
STRATEGIC FRAMING
Nature already solved this. We borrowed the model.
Ecological systems don't have org charts. They have interdependence, distributed roles, clear contribution to the whole, and remarkable resilience under pressure. Mycelial networks share nutrients without a central node directing them. A forest canopy self-organizes around available light. These aren't metaphors. They're operating principles.
The ecological teaming framework draws directly from these systems to ask: what would a product design team look like if it was designed the way nature designs? The answer shapes everything from how ownership is distributed to how decisions get made to what it means to lead without a title.
The best teams aren't managed from the top. They're cultivated from within, like any living system worth sustaining.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
THE DRI MODEL IN PRACTICE
Ownership without hierarchy
In a flat team, authority isn't granted by title. It's earned through accountability. The DRI framework gives designers a concrete practice for claiming and exercising that accountability. Every project, initiative, and decision has a named owner. That owner is empowered to move, and equally expected to.
Accountability
Interdependence
FRICTION MOMENT
Ownership is learned, not assigned.
The DRI model is elegant in theory and genuinely difficult in practice. In early Forthward sessions, designers would intellectually accept the idea of distributed ownership and then immediately defer to whoever felt most senior in the room. Building the muscle for real accountability took longer than I expected and required more direct coaching than the framework alone could provide.
DESIGN APPROACH
Five conditions for an ecologically healthy design team
Derived from Forthward session research, field interviews, and the Orb Growth Framework, these are the conditions that distinguish teams that thrive from teams that merely function.
OUTCOMES
What this framework produced
The ecological teaming framework isn't finished. I'm still running it, still refining it, and still learning from every room it enters. That feels right — a living system should keep growing.
Systems
Reflection
The designers who lead the next decade aren't the ones who learned about AI. They're the ones who learned to think with it from day one.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
Product
Product Workflow
Forging designer-to-developer workflows in the age of AI
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Designers and engineers paired through live cross-functional product sprints
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Program iterations run and validated through structured retros + SME feedback
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Sprints modeled on product team milestones from kickoff to stakeholder presentation
CONTEXT
The most asked interview question that design education consistently fails to answer
Every time a GA graduate walked into an interview and stumbled on the cross-functional question, I took it personally. I'd built the curriculum. That gap was mine to close.
Every associate-level design interview includes a version of the same question: "Tell me about a time you worked closely with an engineer." For most bootcamp graduates, that question lands like a trap. They've learned the craft. They've built the portfolio. But they've never shipped anything with a developer, and hiring managers can tell.
As Design Practice Lead and program advisor, I've spent years building the infrastructure to close that gap: a live, six-week cross-functional collaboration that puts UX design and software engineering students on the same product team, working against the same brief, navigating the same constraints a real team would face on day one.
Collaboration
Design Sprint
STRATEGIC FRAMING
A simulated product team — with the friction kept in
The instinct in design education is to smooth the rough edges. We deliberately didn't. The program was designed to surface the exact tensions that define real product team work: misaligned timelines, handoff ambiguity, competing priorities between design quality and technical feasibility, and the ongoing negotiation of what "done" actually means.
In my role as advisor and practice lead, I shaped the program's operating philosophy: don't simulate a frictionless product team. Simulate a real one, and give students the frameworks to navigate it. The friction is the curriculum.
The best collaboration experience is the one that prepares you to build alignment, navigate ambiguity, and find your footing when the path isn't perfectly clear.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
FRICTION MOMENT
Smooth isn't the same as good.
The first version of the program was too clean. We smoothed out too many rough edges in the name of a good learning experience and ended up teaching students how to collaborate in ideal conditions that don't exist in real product teams. We had to deliberately reintroduce friction — and convince faculty that a harder experience was a better one.
PROGRAM STRUCTURE
Six weeks modeled on a real product team sprint cycle
Each phase of the program mirrors a milestone a junior designer and engineer would hit in their first 90 days on the job, with structured learning objectives, cross-functional working sessions, and a continuous feedback loop informing what the next iteration looks like.
Momentum
Sprint
The best collaboration experience isn't the one where everything goes smoothly. It's the one that prepares you for when it doesn't.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
OUTCOMES
What the program consistently produces
Twenty-five iterations in, this program still surprises me. Every new cohort finds a different edge to test, a constraint we hadn't considered, a tension we thought we'd resolved. That's how I know it's working.
Execution
The designers who will lead the next decade aren't the ones who learned about AI. They're the ones who learned to think with it from day one.
— Tyler Hartrich, Design Practice Lead
