Designing the Shift

The challenge

Three decades in, a company does not lack process. It has plenty — refined, defended, and written long before anyone thought to ask a user anything. Joining one to build its UX practice means inheriting all of it: the assumptions, the reporting lines, and the habit of treating design as the thing that happens at the end, to make the screens look finished.

What I found was not resistance. It was talented engineers and sharp commercial minds who had never been given a shared language for user experience — and no particular reason to want one.

The ask was deceptively simple: make it a design-led company. The reality was slower — influencing without authority, building trust between teams with no history of working together, and proving the worth of design to people who measured success in sprint velocity and quarterly revenue.

What I did

Over 18 months, I:

1. AEstablished a Design Centre of Excellence.
2. BIntroduced a component-based design system adopted across 12+ product teams.
3. CShifted the product development process to include UX from discovery — not just at the handoff stage.
4. DRan design sprints, embedded researchers within engineering squads, and created a mentorship framework that built five teams and grew the practice from 0 to 11.