In the second episode of Project Design: The Good, The Bad and The Wild, host Danielle Wilkins sits down with Matt Kessler-Cleary to talk about project design from his unique perspective as his team's 'fixer of broken things'. With 10+ years of experience as a wearer of many hats AND jack of all trades for the strategy team of one of the largest divisions in a busy global NGO, Matt brings both an implementer and a planner perspective to the Project Design podcast.

Join us for part 1 where we dive into a specific case study of a project that skipped parts of the design phase and what can go wrong. Matt walks us through his experience of dealing with the fallout of a design process that assumed people would simply be on board- and skipped over internal stakeholder engagement. He shares how he had to retrofit stakeholder engagement into an already-moving project and his take aways from the experience.

Be sure to stay tuned for Part 2 where we shift from problems to solutions, and we get into what Matt has learned about how to functionally engage stakeholders, why projects need flexibility rather than rigid plans, and how keeping people- not just process- at the center of design is a non-negotiable for project success.

Part 2 drops on Tuesday Nov. 4th! Be sure to follow to get a notification.

"Organizations think they're answering the question, but they're not really answering the question." This episode explores why- and what to do about it!

In this inaugural episode of Project Design: The Good, The Bad and The Wild, host Danielle Wilkins sits down with guest Kavita Desai to discuss what she has learned over her 18 years leading business development and proposal design for organizations like Palladium Group and Abt Global, including the costly mistakes teams make when designing multi-sector programs under pressure, and a success case in a complex multi-sector program in East Africa that integrated economic growth, nutrition, WASH and community development.

In this episode:

• The stakeholder engagement strategy that prevents missing critical perspectives
• How to bound your work when four technical areas could each pull you down a rabbit hole
• The "touch the hot pan" phenomenon: why people learn design importance the hard way
• Practical advice for small organizations without full proposal teams
• Theory of Change pitfalls and the themes you need to identify first
• Protecting design integrity while meeting aggressive deadlines

Whether you're designing programs for donors and foundations, leading social impact initiatives, managing complex projects, or just trying to understand what project design actually means, this conversation offers practical frameworks you can use immediately.

Subscribe to hear more honest conversations about project design in the real world. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

Have a project design story to share? Connect with Danielle on LinkedIn or share your biggest project design lesson on LinkedIn using #ProjectDesignPodcast