Reshaping Team and Culture: How I Amplified Collaboration

This is the story of how I approached the responsibilities of Principal Interaction Designer and shifted the dynamics of our team, which influenced an improvement in culture and performance that stretched out to the organization.

Problem Spotting

team building

Growth

Background

Already a good team

Our user experience team had three established disciplines. Most of the work happened within each discipline, and when it was ready to be presented, we gathered to critique it.

  • Responsibilities and work were handled well.

  • Communication between the groups was also good.

  • Individuals shared work in critique sessions.

Promoted to principal interaction designer

After 11 years at the company, including three as Senior Interaction Designer, I was promoted to Principal Interaction Designer. This role involved several key responsibilities and opportunities:

  • Manage a team of interaction designers.

  • Serve as an expert on the enterprise systems and processes.

  • Lead the effort to transition our B2B tools to a B2C platform.

  • Building on the efforts of the VP of UX Design and Research to enhance team culture.

Problem spotting

Issues I saw in the critique sessions

  • At times, independent decisions deviated from established patterns, invalidating subsequent decisions and creating wasted effort.

  • The tone of critiquing could be taken as competitive instead of supportive.

  • The topics were becoming too extensive to cover, only allowing one topic per meeting.

  • Individuals were sometimes unfamiliar with the topic to the extent that they couldn't properly engage in the discussion.

Independent decisions could deviate from established patterns invalidating subsequent decisions and creating wasted effort.

Solution Experiment

Shifting what we talk about

I transformed our critique sessions into something that would better fit our group by altering a few aspects:

  • Increase the frequency.

  • Focus on design problems early in the process.

  • Set the expectation of collective contributions to solutions.

  • Change from "critique" to "feedback."

Decisions confirmed by the UX team reduced wasted effort and spread knowledge, creating more efficient independent work.

What resulted was far greater than anything I had expected. The other UX leaders and I noticed how this weekly open forum was turbocharging the quality and efficiency of the work while bringing the group closer.

Results

Going from gaps to overlaps

Design decisions were now backed by a collective knowledge. This alignment set the foundation, allowing more energy to be poured into fine-tuning designs. We came to trust this creative process, which produced better solutions faster.

We got comfortable with accepting ideas and opinions no matter whose they were. The exposure to design problems created coverage in knowledge and allowed the ability to flex the advantages of our versatility.

The ripple effect

Effective communication was becoming part of our identity rather than just an arrow on the diagram, and members of the product and engineering groups were following suit. The various teams within the organization were communicating more efficiently and with greater empathy. The foundational elements of UX and the behaviors we had identified for improvement were beginning to emerge in cross-functional teams.

  • We were starting to approach problems by engaging cross-functional teams sooner.

  • There was a renewed understanding of the challenges that each group was facing.

  • Areas of responsibility were respected, but good ideas were championed no matter where they came from.

Looking back

What I'd do differently

The format worked, but I wish I had exact numbers on our project times before and after. This was, however, one of the first things I changed, and there was no legacy data to use.

I underestimated how much this would impact morale. I thought we'd get better designs. We did. But the bigger win was people feeling like they were part of something collaborative instead of competitive.

Why this matters for product design

This isn't just a "soft skills" story. The way teams work directly impacts the products they build.

When designers collaborate early:

  • Patterns stay consistent across the platform

  • Solutions are more thoughtful because they've been stress-tested by multiple perspectives

  • Products ship faster because there's less rework

When teams trust each other:

  • People take bigger creative risks

  • Junior designers grow faster because they're learning from the whole team

  • The work gets better

Changing how we worked together changed the quality of what we built. That's the business case.

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