Capabilities
Your org needs what it doesn’t have. Bring us in when you need senior design, research, and product capability: as a leader, or as a team.
I’m Gagan Diesh. For 25 years orgs have brought DesignStamp in to be the capability they didn’t have in-house. For some that was a research wing, and we ran global research for PEPFAR, the world’s largest HIV/AIDS initiative, along with work for Johns Hopkins, the OECD, and the Gates Foundation. For others it was a design team, and we designed Central 1’s first mobile banking app, now running at 300+ financial institutions. For others it was someone to run the whole thing.
That’s what happened at Rouxbe: DesignStamp was hired as agency of choice when it was a startup, and I became employee number 3, building their entire dev and design team and managing all design and strategic partnerships. Rouxbe is now a global leader in culinary education, from home kitchens to military bases. I was also Thinkific’s first VP of Design and Research, where I grew the design org from 6 people to over 30 and hired most of them. We worked hard to successfully complete an IPO and achieve a $1 billion valuation.
Are your design and research functions keeping up? Do you have the right people and leaders to build what your customers are asking for? If not, that’s worth a conversation. Whether you need someone to lead your team or extra hands to get through the next two quarters, we’ll work out what’s missing and fix it together.
Fractional design and product leadership
For companies with designers and nobody senior running them.
Embedded with your team: org design, hiring, operating rhythm, critique standards, and roadmap
partnership with your exec team.
This works when
- You have 3 to 15 designers and nobody senior running them.
- Your design leader has either left or is strapped for time and you can’t afford more F/T leadership.
- Your team is not able to keep up with the speed of what is needed to take your product to the next level.
What it looks like in practice
At Think Tank Training Centre, Canada’s top-ranked CG and VFX school, I covered a one-year parental
leave as fractional Head of Product and Design. We rebuilt six admin workflows and recovered 1.5
full-time roles per term.
Before that
Director, then Senior Director, then VP of Experience Design and Research at Thinkific. I scaled the
design org from 6 to over 30, built the research function from zero, and we took the company public at
a $1B+ valuation.
On AI
I build AI products myself, in code, including the coaching platform my own business runs on. So I can
tell your team which parts of their workflow AI is ready for and which parts it isn’t, and set the
rules for who reviews what. Most teams have tried a tool, seen it produce less than mediocre
results, and quietly stopped.
How it works
Usually two days a week, three months minimum. We start with a call about what’s actually going on. I
come back with what I think it needs and what it costs, including the times that’s less than you were
expecting.
Team augmentation
Senior designers, researchers, and product people, working inside your team.
I work out which roles the problem actually needs, find the people, and stay involved while they get up
to speed. You get a team picked for the job, all working to complete a specific project, within a
specific timeline. Speed is a natural byproduct of this type of engagement.
This works when
- You have a bunch of opinions on why your customer is unhappy and no researchers.
- Your roadmap has outrun your design capacity and hiring won’t close the gap in time.
- A project needs senior people who can walk in and be useful in week one.
- You need the capability for two quarters, not two years.
As a research wing
I led global research for PEPFAR, the world’s largest HIV/AIDS initiative, running 150+ participant
studies across multiple countries to guide product direction for care providers and programme
administrators. Similar work for Johns Hopkins, the OECD, and the Gates Foundation.
As a design team
We designed Central 1’s first mobile banking app, then every major release across iOS and Android. It
now serves 300+ financial institutions and ranked first for mobile banking in North America.
Recently
A six-month usability research engagement for Unosquare in 2025: 50+ interviews across four countries
with AI-assisted synthesis, ending in a stakeholder workshop that turned the sharpest pain points into
redesign priorities for their client’s global platform.
Selected Work
A selection of design and strategy work to create lasting change.
For 25 years, we’ve helped leaders and teams design, build, and sustain creative systems that work smarter and lead with intention.
The Real Estate Council of British Columbia is a regulatory agency established by the provincial government in 1958. Its mandate is to protect the public interest by enforcing the licensing and licensee conduct requirements of the Real Estate Services Act.
We have worked with RECBC on several projects, helping them leverage the digital medium to connect in new ways with real estate professionals and consumers. Most recently, we have worked with RECBC to help educate licensees about the changes to agency rules and disclosure requirements and provide tools to allow licensees to comply with new consumer protection rules. You can also read more about our work for RECBC building a knowledge base for real estate professionals.
Licensees spend a lot of time out of their office and often meet consumers at their listing locations. We worked with the Council to understand licensee needs and situations such as busy open houses. We wanted to find a way to help licensees where they were and have them be able to comply with consumer protection rules while saving time. To address these needs, we built a custom app for mobile devices that provides a safe, secure way for licensees and consumers to review and sign disclosure forms together. We designed a brief how-to video and animated tips to provide licensees with a quick walkthrough to set up and use the app. Features such as pre-filled licensee’s information and digital signature collection allows the experience to be streamlined. As well, the app automatically delivers copies of the signed forms to all required parties - licensees, their brokerages and consumers, with one tap. Licensees can also use the app even if they are offline. The app is designed to help consumers understand the licensee/client relationship while protecting their personal information.
The United Way is one of the world's most recognisable charities helping people in need in over 1400 communities globally.
We were engaged by the United Way of the Lower Mainland to conduct a usability review of their “ePledge
system” which enables corporate clients to activate giving campaigns within their own organizations.
Corporate giving is one of the most important sources of donations for the United Way, and over 570
organizations participate in giving campaigns. We interviewed key stakeholders, conducted a heuristic review
of the existing system and made recommendations to simplify the sign-up and donation flows. We also provided
United way with front-end development consultation to help implement some of the changes.
BlueShore Financial (formerly known as the North Shore Credit Union) is a locally owned and managed credit union serving 40,000 client across the Greater Vancouver area. They are the forth largest credit union in BC, with with 13 branches and $5 billion in assets under administration.
BlueShore Financial came to us with the project of helping them better understand the needs and goals of their members. As with most credit unions, they compete with the larger banks and need to continually adapt to the changing needs of their members. The credit union is proud of its local roots and wanted to offer unmatched personalized service that met the needs of its changing member profile.
We scoured the data provided, interviewed key stakeholders in the organization and also conducted independent research to learn more about BlueShore Financial's core members. We then segmented the population based on key attributes that would define each group's unique needs from their financial institution.
Our work became part of the training program for all front-line staff. We also worked with BlueShore to help them define and build out their service offerings for their small business unit, serving the needs for this unique target audience group. The credit union went on to conduct an extensive rebrand and their commitment to offer a differentiated, boutique experience resulted in them creating a unique Financial Spa ® branch environment.
LTSA is responsible for providing reliable land title and survey systems to B.C. The systems are an essential foundation to economic and social prosperity for our province and used on a daily basis by lawyers, notaries, government and real estate professionals.
We have worked with the LTSA since 2013, helping them meet customer needs by enhancing digital services and
improving their various applications to provide access to land title records via enterprise accounts.
We built LTSA’s corporate website, and their myLTSA and Help portals. The corporate site functions as both an informational website and provides access to frequently updated technical documents such as guides, publications and manuals. We have built a complete document repository making it easy for LTSA staff to update the website and maintain version history.
myLTSA and Help portals are vital tools for enterprise customers and we are working continually with LTSA to make the user experience as smooth and painless as possible. Ongoing consultation with key users helps us advocate for features that help LTSA enterprise customers get their job done faster and more efficiently.
The Real Estate Council of British Columbia is a regulatory agency established by the provincial government in 1958. Its mandate is to protect the public interest by enforcing the licensing and licensee conduct requirements of the Real Estate Services Act.
We have worked with RECBC on several projects, helping them leverage the digital medium to connect in new ways with real estate professionals and consumers. Most recently, we have worked with RECBC to help educate licensees about the changes to agency rules and disclosure requirements and provide tools to allow licensees to comply with new consumer protection rules. You can also read more about our work for RECBC building a Forms app for real estate professionals.
We built a centralized information hub that provides licensees with
timely resources and step-by-step guidelines on following the new consumer protection requirements. The
website provides for different styles of learning by providing information through educational videos,
organized lists and scenario-based FAQs. The website features a customized publishing platform so the
Council’s communication staff can work collaboratively to write and publish material efficiently, while
following a disciplined editorial workflow.
Rouxbe is the world's leading online cooking school. Rouxbe offers instructor-guided certification cooking courses for cooks of all levels using intuitive learning technology.
When we started working with Rouxbe, it was not much more than an idea within a PowerPoint document. We
helped define the business strategy, pricing model, and brand for this online offering. We designed the
website from the ground up. We also architected, designed and implemented a proprietary Recipe Player to
play step-by-step videos. The website has been awarded the coveted Adobe Site of the Day award. Rouxbe
continues to win high praise for it’s ease-of-use, deep focus on the cooking experience and clean design
including from top-websites such as Lifehacker. IBM Creative Director, and User Experience expert, Cristene
Gonzalez-Wertz, uses Rouxbe as an example of design elegance in her examples of online success. She is
quoted as calling Rouxbe “Fabulously smart, elegant”.
Far better than local cooking classes I've attended at real culinary schools for a fraction of the price.Jeffrey Beck, Product Tester, Cooking Club of America
Rouxbe is clearly an effective learning program for novices and advanced cooks alike.Betsy Wray, Executive Director, Cooking Club of America
Rouxbe has created an exceptional culinary training tool that can reach aspiring chefs on a scale not previously thought possible.Marcus Samuelsson, Award-winning author and chef
Never in my four decades of culinary education have I seen a resource with Rouxbe's potential to transform the way students learn.Richard Grausman,
C-CAP founder, culinary educator, cookbook author, and James Beard Award Winner
The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the largest global health initiative focused on a single disease ever undertaken, and the United States is the single largest donor to global HIV/AIDS efforts in the world.
We worked with PEPFAR for two years, bringing HIV/AIDS related aide data online and providing increased
data transparency as part of an ongoing initiative of the Ambassador Deborah Birx. Our first release of the
data dashboards was met with praise and its successful adoption lead to the desire to provide more data
access.
To achieve the goal to provide unprecedented data access meant we needed to re-think navigation and provide people with ways to delve deeper into the numbers to understand the work being done in countries around the world.
The new dashboards provide data access down to a district level, and provide side-by-side comparison views across data points. Users are provided multiple ways to interact with the dashboards using map views, drop-down menus and rich, interactive charts to explore data
» Winner: UX for Good | Vancouver UX
Awards, 2015.
» Finalist: UX for Good
| Vancouver UX Awards,
2016.
The OECD is one of the world’s largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data.
We worked with our technical partner 2Paths to deliver an application that provides the user with one-button access to rich data about aid-flows between the reporting countries. We simplified the task by shielding the user from the complexity of the data structure behind the application, and yet providing the expert user with ways to fine-tune the report and it's layout.
We travelled to Paris to work with the OECD to workshop a tool that would provide visitors with comprehensive data on aid work and funding for over 150 developing countries. We created a global research plan to ensure that we had a deep understanding of people's data needs so we could design a tool that worked for them. The audience research helped scope the project and bring focus to the most important workflows that needed to be supported.
I managed an initiative for a large private foundation that aimed at improving access to the OECD's extensive data sets. The effort was complex both technically (providing users with one-button access to rich data about aid-flows between the reporting countries) and logistically (with stakeholders located in Vancouver, Seattle and Paris, and active users around the world). DesignStamp was responsible for user research, business requirements gathering and designing an application that would meet user needs while also complying to complex data rules. DesignStamp was a pleasure to work with, methodical in their ability to conduct user interviews with professors, students and aid recipient organizations around the world. Also I appreciated their skills in diplomatically working with international stakeholders, extracting objective business requirements and helping drive project vision. Their interaction and visual design skills helped us deliver a project that has been immensely successful. I would highly recommend DesignStamp as a partner in any interactive project and hope to work with them again in the future.Ganga Subramanian, Senior Associate Point B Inc (Project Manager for the OECD project)
The Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health catalyzes Canadian collaboration among 100
Members, including Associate Members, who are improving women’s and children’s health in 1000
communities worldwide.
We worked with the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health (CanWaCH) and our development partner 2Paths to build a sustainable Project Data Engine and a compelling and responsive website to reflect the rebrand and evolution of CanWaCH. The new CanWaCH website helps them engage their members and to showcase the impact of CanWaCH, its members and Canada’s investment in Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) globally. CanWaCH members and staff can log in to contribute project data and share other related project information. The result is that the website gives a timely, comprehensive view of the significant global impact of Canadian organizations in the area of women and children's health, capturing projects funded from a variety of sources.
About DesignStamp
Design and product leadership. Twenty-five years of it, most of it hands-on.
DesignStamp has been my practice since 2001. For eighteen years I ran it as a consultancy, leading global research for PEPFAR, the world’s largest HIV/AIDS initiative, and designing the mobile banking platform now running at 300+ financial institutions. Clients included the Gates Foundation, the OECD, and the U.S. government.
In 2019 I put the practice down and went in-house at Thinkific, moving from Director to Senior Director to VP of Experience Design and Research. I scaled the design org from 6 to over 30, built the research function from zero, and we took the company public at a $1B+ valuation. I came back to DesignStamp in 2023.
Since 2023 I’ve done both. Fractional design and product leadership for companies scaling their teams, and workshops for product orgs working out what AI actually changes. I build AI products myself, in code, so that second part isn’t theoretical.
Today we focus on
- Team augmentation. Senior designers, researchers, and product people embedded with yours, for as long as the work needs.
- Fractional design and product leadership. Someone to run the function while you build toward the permanent hire, or instead of it.
I take on a small number of engagements at a time. I have also worked hard to build a network of senior professionals who I can call upon to help when needed. So let’s have a conversation, and figure out what you need so I can help shape the right approach for your situation.
Our Principles
We respect our clients
We listen closely, learn deeply, and partner with clients to understand their goals. We ensure our work aligns with what matters most to them and demonstrate domain expertise they can rely on. Success is measured by the outcomes that matter to their business.
We respect our work
We hold ourselves to a high bar. We share our process, speak plainly, and stand behind the integrity of what we create. We believe great design is collaborative, intentional, and clear.
We respect ourselves
We value diverse perspectives and we work well inside existing teams. Whether we’re leading the design org or supporting it, we’re here to help each other do our best work. ❤️
Our Process
1.Understand your context
We begin by learning your team’s goals, constraints, culture, and the decisions in front of you. This gives us the clarity needed to support you effectively.
2.Align on the real problem
We surface assumptions, map the issues, and confirm what success looks like. This alignment prevents wasted effort and establishes a shared direction.
3. Design the right engagement
Based on what you need, that might be fractional design leadership, embedded product and UX support, an AI workshop, or a focused research engagement. Every approach is tailored and intentionally scoped.
4. Build momentum quickly
We work in short, focused cycles with clear communication, practical deliverables, and visible progress. You get insight, alignment, and decisions that move your team forward.
5. Strengthen long-term capability
Our goal is not dependency. We leave teams and leaders with clearer processes, stronger decision-making habits, and the confidence to move independently.