Embedding user-centered ways of working across a global technology organization
Led research, design-thinking capability building, and experience-design initiatives that helped translate transformation goals into practical team behaviors, tools, and operating practices.
- Role
- Design Lead → Design Manager
- Timeline
- Multiple initiatives over 5 years
- Scope
- Transformation CoE · Design, Research & Capability Building
- Outcomes
- 90% adoption of new ways of working · 95% satisfaction · 2,000+ people
Global program
Capability building delivered across teams and regions.
Strong adoption
New ways of working taken up across participating teams.
Operational change
Practices carried into employee-facing operational experiences.
Visual note — Project visuals are illustrative. Selected artifacts have been adapted, recreated, or sanitized to protect confidential and proprietary information.
The challenge
The organization was adopting more agile, digital, and user-centered ways of working.
Lasting change required more than training: capabilities, team practices, workflows, and employee experiences needed to reinforce one another.
How could we turn transformation goals into ways of working that thousands of people could understand, adopt, and sustain?
My contribution
Led research to understand where change was needed
Led research across teams and roles to understand customer needs, business objectives, team friction, and differences in design and agile maturity. Synthesized findings into insights and implications that helped leaders make decisions about team practices, capabilities, and organizational structures.
Helped shape organizational and team changes
Worked with leaders and cross-functional partners to translate research into recommendations for team structures, roles, practices, and ways of working—bringing a design and systems perspective to decisions that required multiple forms of expertise.
Led design-thinking capability building
Led the design-thinking dimension of a global capability-building program, including curriculum design, facilitation, measurement, and iteration.
Took transformation into operational experiences
Managed the redesign of employee onboarding as a product/design hybrid, applying the same user-centered and agile principles to an operational employee experience and helping reduce engineer onboarding from roughly 90 to 30 days.
What my contribution drew on
Methods & disciplines
- Organizational Change
- Capability Building
- Design Research
- Organizational Design
- Learning Experience Design
- Measurement Strategy
- Organizational Agility
- Transformation
- Agile Scrum and Design Thinking practices
Selected practices
- Qualitative Research
- Research Synthesis
- Curriculum Design
- Workshop Design
- Co-design Facilitation
- Behavioral Analytics
- Jobs-to-be-done
- Digital Transformation op. model
Tools & platforms
- Dovetail
- Miro
- Box
- Confluence
- SharePoint
- Jira
- Excel
- Heap Analytics
Key decisions
Treat transformation as a system, not a training program
Capability building was only one part of the change. I worked across research, team practices, organizational design, facilitation, and employee experiences to understand how different parts of the system needed to reinforce one another.
Use evidence to inform organizational decisions
Rather than prescribe structures or ways of working in isolation, I brought research and team insights into conversations with leaders, helping frame the implications and informing decisions collaboratively.
Make new practices useful in real work
I designed capability building around problems teams were actually navigating, then helped translate those practices into tools, workflows, onboarding, and ways of working that could be applied beyond the learning environment.
What changed
The work helped move user-centered practice from an aspiration into shared learning experiences, team behaviors, tools, and operational improvements.
90%
Adoption of new ways of working
Shared transformation outcome with a cross-functional Center of Excellence.
95%
Satisfaction
Reported by the design capability program.
2,000+
People across 4 continents
Scale of the transformation.