How I Sparked a UX Reckoning in a Large Enterprise
Platform: SaaS
Jan 1, 1970
Role: Intermediate / Senior UX Designer
Matrix UX Team: Centralized & Embedded
Design Leadership
Collaboration
🔥 UX Reckoning Overview
This wasn’t just a design problem, it was a team problem.
UX was misunderstood and disconnected. I worked across silos to rebuild trust, improve collaboration, and make UX part of the product strategy.
The Problem Was Systemic. UX was siloed, reactive, and misunderstood across teams.
I Disrupted the Status Quo.I introduced new rituals, pushed for earlier UX involvement, reframed collaboration, and helped teams think differently about user-centered design.
People and Culture Shifted.UX engagement rose by 85%. Designers took initiative. Stakeholders saw UX as strategic. Silos turned into shared problem-solving.
Context & Problem
The Summary
In 2022, I joined a well-established tech research and advisory firm based in Toronto, a large enterprise known for helping business leaders navigate the evolving landscape of technology, strategy, and operations. I stepped into a UX role that promised high impact — supporting teams building tools used by enterprise decision-makers every day. But what I found was a different kind of challenge.
I had walked into an organization in the middle of a digital transformation, where UX was still misunderstood and underutilized. UX and Visual Design operated like parallel universes. What I thought would be collaborative turned out to be fragmented.
This case study is about that disconnect — and what happened when I decided not to accept it. Over two years, I worked across silos, challenged how UX was perceived, and tried to bring teams into alignment around user-centered thinking. It wasn’t just process improvement — it was culture shift.
My Role
I was the first full-time UX designer brought into a newly forming design team of over 30 people (visual, front-end, motion, and brand designers). Eventually, our UX group of five became centralized, supporting multiple product lines.
I was embedded with one product team full-time, focused on a platform that helps enterprise buyers research, compare, and evaluate software solutions. There, I collaborated with seven designers, engineers, and product managers — all while trying to establish what UX even meant within this environment. It was fast, political, and often chaotic — but full of potential.
What I Saw
From the start, it was clear the problem was how UX was positioned. I saw a culture where user needs were secondary, processes were inherited not designed, and teams didn’t feel empowered to ask “why.”
UX activities weren’t baked into product workflow. We were often brought in late — after decisions were made, after designs were started, sometimes just for sign-off. Product teams prioritized deliverables, not discovery. Visual designers were talented but often boxed into execution roles. Everyone was busy — but few felt aligned.
I started asking questions:
Why aren’t users part of the process earlier?
Why does UX feel separate from design?
Why do teams rely on handoffs instead of collaboration?
I didn’t have all the answers — but I knew we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing.
Challenges I Faced
Late to the Table
I was often brought in late, after PMs aligned and visuals had started. At that point, UX wasn’t strategy. I was constantly playing catch-up, trying to understand user needs in a room that had already moved on.
A Culture That Didn’t Get UX
Product prioritized delivery. Visual designers were incredibly talented but often treated UX like an optional layer. I wasn’t just introducing UX methods; I was trying to change how people thought about UX. There were moments when I felt like an outsider in my own team because the system simply didn’t have room for UX to thrive.
Fragmented Processes
Each product team had their own way of working — some rooted in marketing, others in engineering. There was no shared framework, no central UX metrics, and no accountability for user outcomes. UX work often went unmeasured or unacknowledged. It was hard to prove value in a system that didn’t track it.
Confusing Reporting Lines
I reported to both a UX Director and a Design Director — each with their own leadership style. The result? Mixed messages and unclear priorities. Navigating that dual structure required diplomacy I wasn’t expecting to use so often.
Agile ≠ Collaboration
We were “Agile,” but in practice, the process often worked against us. Design decisions were driven by speed, technical constraints, and short-term wins — not by user needs. UX was squeezed between deadlines and handoffs.
These were systemic patterns, ones that limited how much UX could influence the product. But I didn’t walk away from that. I leaned in. I found allies, designed new ways of working, and slowly shifted the perception of what UX could be.
Solution / The Approach
I didn’t have authority. But I had curiosity, people skills, and a high tolerance for ambiguity. Leading change wasn’t technically part of my role, but doing good UX work was. That meant stepping up anyway. So I focused on three core areas:
Design Leadership
I led process improvements that integrated UX and Visual Design into a shared workflow — no more handoffs, no single owner, just collaboration. My goal wasn’t to “own” UX, but to create space for it.
Team Collaboration
I worked to build trust across disciplines especially with visual designers — by listening first, then co-creating. I introduced research-based practices, working sessions, and tools that helped us get aligned early instead of fixing late.
Data-Driven UX
I made sure our design choices were backed by data. That meant running audits, interpreting analytics, and connecting insights to business goals — even when no one asked for them. It built credibility, fast.
Process
01
Design Leadership
Year 1: Building from Scratch
I joined six months after the UX team was formed — brought in to support a high-priority initiative around a set of visual frameworks used across the business. These deliverables were technically branded content, but they were also central to the company’s product experience.
The problem? The creation process was chaotic. Designers were handed dense, technical information and asked to “make it beautiful” — without context, research, or a clear understanding of the end user. UX was brought in to “wireframe,” but not to shape the message.
I worked with our UX Director to define a process that balanced visual storytelling with user clarity. We applied the Double Diamond framework to structure our approach — UX led the Discover and Define, while visual designers owned Develop and Deliver.
It worked — but it wasn’t enough.
What I Noticed
The process made production smoother, but it also split UX and visual design into separate tracks. Designers began to feel like wireframe “assembly workers,” disconnected from the creative part of the work. We needed shared ownership — not better handoffs.
Year 2: Breaking the Wall
When I joined a new product team the following year, I saw an opportunity to fix this. I launched a pilot program (with support from the design director) to integrate UX and Visual Design through the entire Double Diamond.
Instead of UX handing off wireframes, we ran collaborative working sessions from day one — sketching and mapping, together. I used my own background in illustration to help visual designers explore concepts more freely and connect with the “why” behind each layout.
The Structure I Introduced:
Diverge Phase: After intake, we mapped ideas, sketched loosely, and talked about story before structure.
Converge Phase: We selected directions, built black-and-white mockups, and refined together with stakeholder input.
Impact:
Designers became co-creators, not executors.
Stakeholders got better storytelling and clearer visuals.
Other UX designers began adopting the model across teams.
I was invited to advise cross-product initiatives and mentor new hires.
That’s where the culture shift started — not in a grand strategy, but in small repeated moments of showing what better collaboration could look like.
02
Team Collaboration
Double Diamond in Action
The success of the pilot gave me something more valuable than process: trust. Designers started inviting me into their working sessions. Developers looped me in early. I wasn’t just the UX person anymore — I was part of the team.
I took that momentum and expanded the process beyond a single framework. I started attending daily scrums, leading brainstorming workshops, and creating new rituals that made UX more visible and valuable across the product lifecycle.
What I Walked Into
Before I joined this team, designers mostly worked in high-fidelity. There was little time (or space) for discovery. Design reviews were the only real feedback moments, and product decisions were often finalized before any wireframes existed.
The process was linear and siloed — research and design happened in isolation, if at all. Teams relied heavily on handoffs, and that created misalignment, rushed decisions, and avoidable rework. Everyone was moving fast, but not always together.
What I Introduced
To break that pattern, I embedded UX into the earliest stages of the work. I started running lightweight workshops at the start of projects with the design team.
Those sessions became a model for how we worked. They blurred the lines between roles, invited different voices into the room, and made space for shared problem-solving before a single pixel was pushed.
Redesigning one of the SaaS platform’s most visited content pages became the first real test of this kind of collaboration.
I worked closely with product and front-end designers to rethink the structure together. We sketched in real time, built low-fidelity wireframes, and worked within the constraints of our design system. In the end, the redesign was more than just a layout fix — it made visible the kind of collaborative process we wanted more of.
That approach carried into other projects — including the Search experience, which helps enterprise buyers quickly surface relevant software — and the product discovery experience: a high-traffic entry point where users explore, compare, and shortlist vendors in a given category.
I brought in competitor analysis, ran a heatmap audit, pulled analytics data, and facilitated open whiteboarding sessions with the team. These meetings changed everything — we stopped designing based on assumptions and started designing based on insights and hypotheses. We prototyped search flows together, reframed filtering logic around actual user behavior, and began to align on what finding software should actually feel like — not just how it should look.
The product discovery experience, in particular, became an opportunity to lead with UX strategy — not just design.
There were no clear user goals, no business requirements, and a tight deadline. So I stepped in to shape the project from the ground up. I helped the team define proto-personas, mapped out real user journeys using Hotjar and GA, and facilitated workshops to align those insights with business outcomes. We created task flows and black-and-white wireframes that framed the page around actual decision-making needs — like vendor comparison and shortlisting.
In the end, some of the wireframes weren’t implemented — but the strategy stuck. It revealed just how much UX could contribute when we entered the room early, asked better questions, and worked in the open.
Each of these projects reflected a small shift in the team’s culture: From “Who owns what?” to “What are we trying to solve — and how can we do it together?”
What I Was Up Against
These collaborative projects showed what was possible — but they were also exceptions. In other teams, this kind of cross-functional work wasn’t happening.
The deeper reality was more complicated. While I found pockets of trust and momentum within this team, the broader system still didn’t fully understand or support UX. I was often straddling progress and resistance at the same time — trying to model a new way of working while still navigating old habits and entrenched structures.
No UX process: Even with a centralized team, UX was barely integrated. I was working in isolation, sometimes on parallel tracks with designers who (understandably) saw UX as a threat to their autonomy.
No business clarity: Product leadership valued polish — but without a clear business model, it was hard to know if we were optimizing for leads, conversion, or content engagement. This made it almost impossible to define “success” for UX work.
What Changed
Designers started scheduling their own research sessions
Product leaders started asking for UX input before dev planning
Collaboration shifted from “handoff” to “shared ownership”
I was invited into more strategic conversations, not just design reviews
The Real Win
I wasn’t just shaping a process — I was helping reshape a mindset: that design wasn’t a service function. It was a strategy partner.
3. Data-Driven UX
UX was rarely invited to the table early. So I started pulling up a chair anyway. I met with the design director and suggested a different approach — that UX could work ahead of sprints, not just within them. That we could provide strategy, not just UI. And to do that, we’d need space for discovery.
Leading with Evidence
In one project, I led a heuristic evaluation of a newly launched internal portal, a tool already in use by members. I identified critical usability issues, including cognitive overload during key tasks like managing team members and setting access permissions.
After mapping pain points and assessing the design system’s constraints, I audited similar SaaS platforms to find more efficient patterns. I explored multiple interaction models, balancing feasibility with clarity. Among them, I proposed a modal flow that simplified adding members, assigning roles, and editing permissions — all without breaking context.
The modal created a focused, step-by-step experience that reduced complexity and aligned with our component library. I presented the solution through lightweight prototypes, facilitated feedback sessions, and iterated based on stakeholder input. Even with limited frontend resources and unclear ownership, I translated those insights into concrete design recommendations. By tying those choices directly to user outcomes — like reduced task time and lower error rates — I secured stakeholder buy-in and got the fixes prioritized.
In another initiative, I tackled a platform-wide navigation redesign. I used Google Analytics, competitor labels and heatmaps to identify user drop-offs. The existing IA mirrored internal structures — not user mental models. I proposed a new menu logic that grouped content by intent and behavior, not department. It was simple, low-lift — and approved for testing. That redesign became a reference for later cross-platform consistency. A big win for a small act of UX persistence.
What Got in the Way
Data ≠ Truth: Designers were often handed metrics without context. I reframed data as a starting point for exploration, not the final word.
Lean UX, Big Gaps: Research wasn’t resourced across product lines. I coached teammates on how to run lightweight tests and build UX value into their own process.
The Outcome
UX moved closer to strategy, not just delivery
I helped create alignment between user needs and business priorities
I learned that influence sometimes starts with simply showing what’s possible
Learnings & Results
All People Matter
Processes are important — but they mean nothing if the people behind them don’t feel supported. Early on, I tried to “fix” the system. But the real turning point came when I stopped trying to be right and started being real. I asked for help. I showed vulnerability. And I built trust by being human first, designer second.
Stand Up for Design
Advocating for UX in a large, complex organization isn’t about waving the UX flag. It’s about knowing when to speak up — and when to listen. I learned that pushing for user-centered design isn’t a solo mission. It’s a team sport. And sometimes, standing up means sitting down with people who’ve never had UX in the room and starting a conversation.
Strategic Partnerships
The biggest shifts I saw didn’t come from process diagrams or deck slides — they came from relationships. From hallway/teams chats. From empathy. I built alliances across product and design not by having all the answers, but by being someone people trusted to ask better questions.
Growth as a Designer
When I left, I didn’t take a case study with me but I created a shift in culture. A better understanding of what UX could be. Designers started doing their own research. Product teams asked more questions. And the conversations I started? They are still going.
Measurable Impact:
0 → 100% team participation in co-design: from no shared UX practices to full-team collaboration across every project we touched
Designers self-organized around early research and ideation
Stakeholders actively invited UX into strategic planning and discovery
Peers shared unsolicited feedback about feeling empowered and learning new ways of working
A clear cultural shift from siloed delivery to shared problem-solving
🔥 Final Thought
This wasn’t just about design. It was about change — slow, messy, human change. And change doesn’t happen through process alone.It happens through people. Through friction. Through fire. That’s why this was a reckoning — and why I’m proud of it.
Contents
Recent Project
UX Research
User Testing
UX Design
Design Thinking