The work described here was performed while I was in the employ of an Illinois MedTech firm of some 400 employees.

Within two weeks of my start date in September of 2021, the project I was brought on to help with was put on hold indefinitely.

Why?

I was about to find out.

To make myself useful, I volunteered to work on a smaller effort to redesign their struggling Developer Portal. Doing so would give me a front row seat to the endemic design ingestion problems this employer, like so many growth-state companies, was experiencing. Through careful evangelism, expressed almost entirely as a measure of my success delivering for this project, I was able to break the design logjam and evolve this company’s UX practice.

Here’s how.

When an organization is utterly dominated by the engineering team, how does one designer get that org focused on improving their dysfunctional design practice to get better outcomes?

By demonstrating at every phase of his first project the benefit to the dev teams involved.

When I started work on this project, fundamental UX Design strategies and processes were poorly understood and haphazardly embraced by a small and inexperienced design team. By unobtrusively invoking design fundamentals at key junctures over the course of this project, I was able to navigate headwinds, establish a cadence of progress, and deliver useful outcomes at each step on the path to completion.

By identifying the key stakeholders and showing them we would never design an appropriate solution until we had both a deep and broad understanding of the problem, I achieved momentum and mitigated the product manager’s inexperience.

Key victories included two elegant diagrams that Engineering regarded as supremely useful in describing both the problem we were trying to solve, and a solution worth pursuing.

These diagrams and word of other UX breakthroughs led to an invitation from leadership to present on these successes and what I’d done to achieve them. Shortly after, I was put in charge of design for their most strategically important projects. And within a year of that presentation, the UX staff was tripled.