Designing in the Open - Leading with Collaboration and Clarity

As our teams scaled, the design process wasn’t keeping pace with the growing complexity of cross-functional collaboration. Too often, design felt disconnected, a black box that others couldn’t see into or influence early enough.

This created growing friction:

• Sprint planning lacked clarity on what was ready, leading to last-minute compromises.
• Engineers wanted earlier input and visibility to validate feasibility.
• PMs and EMs lacked a shared view into design progress, rationale, and readiness.

Design wasn’t intentionally siloed, but without clear visibility and rituals, collaboration broke down. We needed to make design more accessible, transparent, and participatory across all disciplines, without slowing teams down.

To reduce confusion and misalignment, I prioritized visibility from the earliest stages.

What I Did:

• Shared rough drafts, not just polished deliverables.
• Centralized collaboration in Miro and FigJam, enabling asynchronous feedback across disciplines.
• Maintained a living design hub updated weekly, the team’s single source of design truth.

Why It Mattered:

• Created a shared mental model across teams.
• Surfaced misalignment early, avoiding costly delays.
• Enabled a faster feedback loop across PM, EM, and engineering.

Impact:

Design can easily fall out of sync with agile teams. I embedded myself fully into scrum rituals to ensure design wasn’t a blocker  or an afterthought.

What I Did:

• Participated in daily standups, planning, refinement, and retros.
• Used those moments to share WIP, flag risks, and align direction.
• Sequenced design delivery around dev readiness, in collaboration with PMs and EMs.

Why It Helped:

• Eliminated big handoffs. Engineering understood the work before dev started.
• Prevented feasibility surprises from blocking delivery.
• Boosted trust that design was integrated and responsive.

Impact:

Beyond just shipping designs, I empowered the team to think more visually and strategically. I championed early visual storytelling using sketches and wireframes, transforming abstract ideas into tangible concepts that fostered deep understanding and alignment across disciplines.

What I Did:

• Used sketches and lightweight wireframes to make complex ideas tangible fast, providing clear visual narratives of user flows and system interactions.
• Shared rough concepts and rationale visually from the earliest stages, ensuring everyone could “see” the problem and proposed solution.
• Facilitated collaborative feedback sessions around these early visuals, creating a shared space for diverse perspectives to shape direction.

Why It Mattered:

• Accelerated decision-making by surfacing and resolving critical questions visually, long before high-fidelity design.
• Built a shared mental model across product, engineering, and design, ensuring teams were literally on the same page.
• Drove earlier alignment on strategy and technical feasibility, significantly reducing late-stage surprises and rework.

Impact:

To ensure engineering had clear context for why we were building certain features, I prioritized regularly sharing user research and pain points as part of our design process.

What I Did:

• Embedded key user insights and pain point summaries into design reviews, sprint planning, and standups.
• Maintained a living repository of user feedback (from usability tests, support tickets, and interviews) that engineering could reference asynchronously.
• Highlighted user quotes and impact scenarios alongside prototypes to make the rationale behind design decisions more tangible.

Why It Mattered:

• Provided engineering with a direct line of sight into the real problems we were solving, increasing engagement and empathy.
• Helped teams understand not just feature specifications, but also the broader context and intended outcomes.
• Reduced back-and-forth by grounding decisions in clear user evidence, not just design intuition.

By consistently integrating user voices into everyday collaboration, we built stronger cross-functional alignment and delivered work that was more purposeful and more likely to meet real needs.

Design leadership isn’t just about pixels; it’s about how we solve problems together. By improving rituals, increasing visibility, and fostering shared ownership, I helped the team operate with greater cohesion across three active Scrum teams.

These changes led to tangible business outcomes:

• Faster delivery: Design aligned with development cycles, accelerating readiness by 1–2 sprints.
• Fewer blockers: Early visibility reduced late-stage misalignment and delivery risk.
• Stronger team cohesion: Shared tools and rituals built trust and transparency across disciplines.

While this wasn’t tied to a single feature, the outcomes were foundational: smoother delivery, increased velocity, and greater confidence across teams, all of which are critical for scaling design in a fast-paced B2B SaaS environment.