From Silos to Shared Footing

The situation

The product development process had drifted into a pattern common enough to have a name: Agile-Fall, agile ceremonies wrapped around what is really a sequential, hand-off-driven flow. From the UX vantage point it ran like this: requirements were defined upstream with little direct user input, often shaped by competitive analysis rather than research; design entered late and downstream, without a real seat in framing the problem; and engineering frequently built from pre-made component libraries rather than the established design system, so what was designed and what shipped quietly diverged. UX had little visibility at the front of the process (where problems get defined) or at the back (where solutions get validated).

To be fair about it, UX was part of the pattern too; the “design hero” habit of stepping in to hand off finished screens reinforced the same silos it complained about. The issue was not any one team. It was a system that never made its own seams visible.

No one asked me to look at this. After three years working inside the process, I had watched the same friction repeat often enough that I could map it, so I did.

The approach

Rather than argue the problem in meetings, I made it legible. I mapped the current-state flow as it actually ran and named the patterns plainly, including UX's own, so the teams had a shared picture to react to instead of competing anecdotes.

Then I designed a future state. I was not reinventing anything; I applied established methods (Lean UX, the Lean Strategy and Lean Product canvases, and a hypothesis prioritization canvas) to answer the questions the process kept skipping: who does what, and when; what information is needed, and from whom (users, product, business analysis); and how the functions hand off and collaborate from product strategy, through development, into delivery. The aim was to move the teams from shipping outputs toward defining and measuring outcomes, and to put design on equal footing with product and engineering rather than at the end of the line.

What I built

Two artifacts the cross-functional teams could read and argue with: a current-state map that diagnosed how work really flowed, and a future-state operating model that proposed how it could flow instead.

The outcome

I socialized both with VP-level stakeholders across operations, engineering, and product, along with design peers, to pressure-test whether the diagnosis rang true and the future state was viable. It earned their full endorsement, and it seeded a Lean UX and Design Sprint pilot that I went on to develop.