Research on how university faculty design courses has been limited and marked by modest detail on faculty design processes. Addressing this gap, seven faculty members supported by an educational developer at a teaching-intensive university used collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to explain how university faculty engage in reflective, iterative approaches to learning design. Collaborative analysis and interpretation of systematically collected data drawn from individual experiences in learning design reveal how faculty use reflection as a tool in learning design to recognize problems, devise solutions and constructively process emotions. Through reflection, faculty identify design solutions that are responsive to circumstances during course delivery, capture reasoning that informs design solutions for future course iterations and accurately gauge the appropriate timing of design changes based on factors such as scale and feasibility. This article offers detailed ethnographic evidence and new findings that enrich our understanding of claims made in previous interview-based studies of faculty design.