Cross-functional Design Thinking and Execution

Mar 2024 - Mar 2025

Overview

A holistic initiative to enhance collaboration, discovery, and design quality across the product lifecycle.
As design leader, I guided the creation of a scalable discovery process, Design Acceptance Criteria, and training resources, ensuring stakeholder alignment, project momentum, and on-time delivery. This work improved efficiency and communication for international cross-functional teams operating across five time zones.
Context: Distributed teams, increasing product complexity, and growing demand for faster, higher-quality delivery.
Goal: Establish a scalable, repeatable approach to design execution that improves alignment, speed, and quality across teams.

Problem Statement

"We needed a consistent, strategic design process that could bridge cross-functional silos, improve stakeholder alignment, and deliver high-quality experiences on time."

• Lack of shared understanding between design, product, and engineering teams.

• Discovery processes were inconsistent and not always mobile-first.

• No standard design acceptance criteria, leading to misinterpretations and rework.

Business Goals

• Reduce delivery delays caused by misalignment.

• Improve product quality and user satisfaction.

• Create scalable design frameworks that can be applied across multiple teams and products.

Initiative #1 — Design Discovery Approach & Timeline

• Piloted and rolled out a Design Roadmap Tool that improved productivity, communication, and clarity across design, program management, and cross-functional partners.

• Created a collaboration framework for design, product, and engineering, including:

  • Recurring cross-functional design reviews

  • Early alignment checkpoints

  • Async updates and shared documentation

• Achieved adoption across a 1,000+ person design organization.

• Outcome: Increased stakeholder alignment, fostered communication, reduced rework and improved delivery timelines.

Initiative #2 — Enhancing Cross-functional Collaboration

• Designed and implemented a mobile-first, responsive-focused discovery process.

• Activities:

  • User interviews, analytics, competitive benchmarking.

  • Pain point mapping (mobile usability focus).

  • Miro workshops with post-ups, storyboarding, $100 test, assumption smash.

  • Prototyping, user testing, customer validation and heuristic evaluations

• Outcome: Discovery process adopted across teams; accelerated research-to-design handoff timelines.

Initiative #3 — Design Acceptance Criteria Template & Training

• Developed Design Acceptance Criteria (DAC) template to standardize expectations between designers and engineers.

• Conducted training for both design and cross-functional partners to ensure clarity and adoption.

• Embedded DAC into design QA processes and sprint planning.

• Outcome: Reduced design-related issues, improved communication across teams and delivery predictability.

Outcomes — Strategic Impact

• Transformed fragmented processes into a cohesive design execution framework.

• Improved time-to-market while maintaining quality standards.

• Created a playbook that scaled across products and teams.

Key Leadership Insights

• Flexibility is critical — processes must evolve with team needs.

• Collaboration thrives when transparency and shared tools are in place.

• Setting clear quality expectations empowers teams and reduces churn.