Designing through chaos: Leadership lessons from motherhood
At Noora Health, our work is rooted in care — care in what we build and care in how we lead. With women holding more than 60% of our leadership roles, many of those guiding the work are mothers, shaping programs centered on empathy and human connection while learning new meanings of care in their own lives. And within our design teams, this overlap runs deepest.
Because let’s be honest: motherhood is the hardest design challenge there is.
It’s full of iteration, emotional feedback loops, and user-testing at unpredictable hours. It forces you to accept failure as data, to balance guilt between worlds, and to master the art of patience — the ultimate skill of human-centered design.
Yet in a world where motherhood still carries invisible penalties around pregnancy and raising young children, we often fail to recognize how these experiences expand leadership capacity. Motherhood refines judgment, strengthens prioritization, and deepens listening. It doesn’t dilute design leadership — it amplifies it.
But this growth is only possible in a workplace built to support life rather than compete with it. As the four of us — Cinta, Manju, Parul, and Samina — reflected on our journeys as mothers and design leaders, we noticed how often the roles influence each other. We draw from both constantly, and the interplay makes our work better. Here, motherhood isn’t a pause — it actively shapes how we care, design, and lead.
Cinta: Designing through mess (and meaning)
People often talk about design leadership as if it’s all about structure and clarity. As a mother of two children, ages eleven and six, motherhood taught me something else: clarity rarely comes first; you design your way to it through the mess.
There’s no manual for raising a child, just as there’s no perfect framework for designing a Care Companion Program (CCP). Both begin with empathy and evolve through trial, error, and a lot of iteration. In Indonesia, the CCP has gone through multiple versions over the last two years. We’ve tested, failed, adapted, and rebuilt across districts. And often, leading the Program Design and Development team — made up of public health practitioners, designers, and content writers — has often felt like managing a large, loud, loving household, complete with deadlines instead of tantrums (though sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference).
There have been moments of tension in co-creation workshops, disagreements over program directions, and exhaustion during back-to-back pilots. In those moments, I learned that empathy isn’t softness; it’s structure. It’s how you hold space for people while still moving toward purpose.
And failure? It’s inevitable. I’ve failed as a designer, as a mother, sometimes both in the same hour. But I’ve stopped seeing failure as something to avoid. It’s simply how we learn, a sign that we’re trying to care better.
Motherhood didn’t teach me to multitask. It taught me to slow down, to listen, to pick my battles, and to accept that sometimes ‘good enough’ is exactly enough.
Samina: Designing through shifts (and a toddler)
I started leading a design team at Noora Health long before I became a mother — at a time when I wasn’t even sure if parenthood was meant for me. Back then, leading a team felt like a design challenge in itself: balancing personalities, protecting the process, and creating space for experimentation while holding structure.
Then came motherhood and everything shifted. The work didn’t change, but I did. I realized that my work had been my first child all along — nurtured, obsessed over, and guided with care. When my son arrived, a new type of guilt found home, splitting my heart between two worlds I deeply cared for.
As I navigated my relationship with my newborn (now toddler), and my first born — designing behavior change programs — I saw how the two roles had been preparing me for each other. Leading a design team had already taught me patience, curiosity, and the power of guiding without control. Motherhood, in turn, made me a steadier design leader — more empathetic, more focused, more comfortable with ambiguity. As we designed maternal and child health programs, every design decision felt like a mini prototype I was living at home.
I’m still learning how to navigate between the two deeply interconnected roles in my life. It’s rarely perfect, often messy, but deeply human. And motherhood has made me more forgiving of others and myself.
After all, good design, like good parenting, isn’t about control or perfection. It’s about showing up with care, even when you’re not sure what the next iteration will look like.
Cinta, Manju, Parul, and Samina with their teams — celebrating teamwork, creativity, and mom-powered leadership.
Manju: Designing through endurance (and the power of the long game)
As a designer, swimmer, and mother of a six-year-old, I’ve learned that endurance isn’t about finishing first. It’s about staying consistent through fatigue, self-doubt, and sometimes murky waters — holding on to that one idea, the sight of the shore, or that warm cuddle inspiring a stellar finish. And you do it again and again, against all odds.
But you can’t lead a team, train for an endurance sport, or raise a child alone. All three require systems of support, capable of carrying you through the unpredictable, exhausting, and sometimes overwhelming moments. Similarly, caregiving relies on systems that are reliable, consistent, and resilient. And this perspective anchors my work within The Caregiving Lab, where we design for systems of care that hold people through their most vulnerable moments.
Over time, I’ve embraced the philosophy of gentle parenting, valuing guidance over control and connection over punishment. It is hard, and I fail miserably every now and then, grasping at that last thread of sanity. Somewhere along the way, it has spilled into gentle ‘managing’ — having my team’s back while helping keep the momentum and focus on track. Motivating a young team through their personal tribulations and inhibitions is remarkably similar to dealing with a child who needs that gentle yet firm nudge to build confidence.
It’s not about being soft; it’s about leading with steadiness. The kind that builds on trust instead of fear, and that remembers everyone is doing their best (even when someone misses the brief or spills milk on your laptop!)
Parul: Designing through grace, guilt, (and growth)
When I started leading Noora Health’s program design and development team in India, I believed leadership meant having all the answers. Then motherhood laughed in my face. My teenage daughter reminds me daily that authority is a myth, and a team of nearly forty grown-ups who don’t let me forget it.
Both roles run on the same principle: I may not control the outcome but I can always choose my response. And what worked brilliantly yesterday, might flop before lunch the next day.
Leadership, like parenting, is mostly about learning out loud — noticing how you misread the moment, laughing about it later, and pivoting.
Whether it’s a stakeholder who needs more clarity but also less detail in the tool, or a teenager who suddenly finds hugs deeply embarrassing, the practice is the same.
Managing the guilt of missing a milestone at home or a moment at work, however, has been a journey unto itself. I’ve come to accept that guilt isn’t just a nuisance; it’s a compass. It nudges you to pause, reshuffle, and remember what truly matters.
Motherhood gave me perspective at work. Success stopped being about perfect outcomes and became about nurturing the right environment — for my child, my team, and myself — all a work in progress perpetually. And when all else fails, I’ve learned to laugh at the situation, at myself, and at the beautiful chaos of it all.
Designing with heart
If there’s one thing we’ve learnt, it’s that motherhood makes you acutely aware of what matters. You become ruthless about focus and generous with forgiveness — both of yourself and others. You stop romanticizing the end product and start celebrating little moments of prototyping.
In a world that often values efficiency over empathy, mothers in design remind us that care is not a distraction from leadership; it’s the source of it.
As we continue to design programs that support family caregivers across South and Southeast Asia, we hope this reflection serves as a quiet tribute — not only to the mothers in our teams, but to every caregiver who teaches us, daily, what it means to design with heart.
Cinta Azwiendasari
Program Design and Development Lead, Indonesia
Manju Catherine Pothen
Associate Design Director
Parul Singh
Head, Program Design and Development, India
Samina Rahman
Director, Program Design and Development
