Enterprise Design Leadership
Embedding Design at Scale, resulting in 80% customer value delivery
Building design capability at scale through Product U — co-creating curriculum, metrics, and delivery across four global offices, training 2,000+ people and embedding user-centricity into organizational structure.
Design capability-building at scale delivered measurable improvements in OKRs, team health, and design and agile maturity across the organization.
Organizations bring design leaders and talent to their capabilities but rarely adopt user-centered design and design thinking through workshops and playbooks to share these ways of working. As a result, products and services often fall short of customer and user expectations. Design thinking and agility are also rarely embedded into structures, tools, and culture.
I partnered with senior leadership as Design Lead (later Design Manager) to change that. The work evolved through two phases along an arc: evangelism → infrastructure → product — building design capability at scale and embedding user-centricity into organizational structure.
"Strong mission and vision act as a north star — but what actually moves organizations forward is the culture and structures that empower teams to do their best work."
How might we move beyond evangelism to make user-centered ways of working the default?
Product U & global training
Function leadership wanted to become user-centric and transform their ways of working to deliver greater impact. I co-created Product U: curriculum, metrics, and delivery across four global offices — training 2,000+ people while measuring behavior change and impact metrics. Much of this work happened remotely across time zones, requiring a new approach to facilitation. I designed immersive virtual workshops using Miro and Zoom that maintained energy and collaboration despite distance — skills that became essential as the organization shifted to distributed work. In-person facilitation spanned four continents, adapting to local contexts while maintaining consistent principles and increasing team health.
Embedding user-centricity
I embedded user-centricity into organizational structure and aligned business strategy with team outcomes by delivering research and UX strategy recommendations. Research identified friction points in team organization and informed restructuring recommendations and a simplified agile/design framework practical for immediate adoption. I led jobs-to-be-done research triangulated with KPIs, business opportunities, and users' unmet needs.
Ways of working & center of excellence
I provided design UX for ways of working across the function: mentored teams through design and agile ops, developed lean playbooks with core principles, and encouraged teams to codify their design-led ways of working. I simplified agile/design frameworks for cross-functional squads to share best practices and terminology, redesigned engineer onboarding using behavior design strategy, and led design capabilities for a center of excellence for user-centered strategy, OKRs, and team health practices.
Through this work, I saw how much impact comes from investing in people: modeling the leadership behaviors you want to see, creating space for adaptability, and providing just enough structure to enable (not constrain) collaboration.
What I learned:
- Organizational design and change benefit from product design approaches. Research, iteration, and co-creation work for change as much as for products.
- Organizational agility is a mindset, not a framework. It's about how teams think and adapt.
- Creativity and play at work aren't just "nice to have." They drive better outcomes.
I'm excited to explore how AI and agentic tools can accelerate design work while keeping qualitative research and human-centered practices at the core. In a landscape rushing toward automation, thoughtful, sustainable design is a real differentiator.