Co-operators

My Role

Investigator, then architect of the fix. I gathered feedback from both the design team and their product and development stakeholders to find the root cause. What I found wasn't a performance problem—it was a systems problem. Once the fixes were in place, the AVP hired me as UX Design Director to lead the team through the next phase.

The Diagnosis

The design team was operating in a no-win situation created by the system around them, not by them.

Work was arriving through individual chats and emails with inconsistent context, requiring significant back-and-forth before design could even begin. There were no clear criteria for what a design request needed to include, and no defined ownership over who was responsible for what. This made the team look slow when they were actually under-resourced with incomplete briefs.

After work was delivered, product continued to request changes with no process to manage or contain scope. The team absorbed these requests without a mechanism to push back, which reinforced the perception that design was the source of churn—when in fact, design was just the most visible part of an unmanaged change problem.

The team also had no reliable way to communicate how long work would take, which meant that delays were attributed to design capacity rather than to scope ambiguity.

The Fix

I addressed the root causes directly, working across design, product, and development peers to change the system—not just the team’s behaviour.

Intake workflow. I established a clear framework defining what information was required to start design work, who was responsible for providing it, and what happened if it wasn’t there. This was broadcast across product and UX so expectations were shared and visible. The back-and-forth dropped significantly.

Change management process. Working with product and development peers, I helped establish a process for managing post-delivery change requests. This gave the design team a legitimate mechanism to flag scope changes, rather than silently absorbing them.

Time estimation and communication. I worked with the team to develop more realistic estimates for design work and to communicate those estimates clearly to stakeholders—turning an invisible process into a visible and accountable one.

Research integration. In partnership with the UX Research Director, I restructured how researchers were brought into the design workflow—earlier in the process, where they could reduce rework rather than validate decisions after the fact. I also upskilled the design and content team to take on more usability testing, enabling squads to move faster without waiting on centralized research capacity.

Outcome

Design Velocity and Design Collaboration both improved measurably. The steering committee risk line item was gone within roughly two months. Stakeholders who had been frustrated with the team reported satisfaction with the new working model.

The AVP hired me as UX Design Director in the fall. I took on a team of 10 designers, writers, and strategists—and led them through a subsequent org restructure that reshaped the team and how design operated across the organization.