Building a UX Practice Across 200+ Stakeholders
How I helped scale a design team from 4 to 15 and establish more consistent, accessible product design across a complex federal ecosystem.
Involved internal USDA systems, so limited information can be shared
Overview
At Spatial Front, I helped lead UX across the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation division, a complex ecosystem of data-heavy products developed by multiple teams and vendors.
When I joined, designers were working without shared patterns, accessibility practices varied from product to product, and UX was often introduced late in the delivery process. I helped create a more consistent design foundation while growing the design team from 4 to 15 and building stronger UX understanding across more than 200 stakeholders.
The work combined design systems, accessibility standards, team development, cross-functional education, and advocacy for earlier UX involvement in product decisions.
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
Organization: Spatial Front / USDA FPAC
Scope: Multiple enterprise applications and product teams
Stakeholders: 200+ across design, engineering, product, and leadership
Team growth: 4 to 15 designers
Focus: Design systems, accessibility, UX process, mentorship, and organizational change
Challenge
The organization had talented people working across a complicated product ecosystem, but there was no shared UX foundation to help them work consistently.
Products used inconsistent interface patterns.
Accessibility practices were applied unevenly.
Designers were often brought into projects after important product decisions had already been made.
Developers and stakeholders had different expectations about what UX contributed.
Designers did not have a consistent framework for growth, mentorship, or career development.
The challenge was not simply to create a visual system. It was to make better UX practice easier to adopt across an organization with legacy technology, distributed teams, and competing delivery pressures.
My Role
As Lead UX/UI Designer, I worked across three connected areas:
Product foundations: establishing shared patterns, accessibility guidance, and interaction standards.
Team development: hiring, mentoring, and creating clearer roles and growth paths for designers.
Organizational advocacy: helping product, engineering, and leadership teams understand how earlier UX involvement could reduce rework and improve product quality.
My Approach
Start with the highest-impact workflows
A complete design-system rebuild was not realistic given the number of products, legacy constraints, and delivery timelines. I began by auditing existing patterns and prioritizing the highest-traffic and highest-friction workflows.
This let the team demonstrate value early instead of asking the organization to wait for a perfect system.
Extend familiar frameworks instead of starting from scratch
I created a hybrid design foundation using Material, Fluent, and USDA/FPAC patterns. The goal was not to create a completely new visual language. It was to give teams a practical, accessible starting point that fit the frameworks many developers already understood.
This reduced adoption friction and made the system easier to use across separate teams and vendors.
Make UX practice lightweight enough to adopt
I documented interaction patterns, accessibility guidance, and design expectations, but deliberately avoided creating a process so heavy that teams would bypass it under deadline pressure.
I also helped bring UX earlier into Agile planning, so designers could influence product direction before requirements and technical decisions were locked.
Growing the Design Practice
As the team grew, I helped define clearer roles, responsibilities, and career paths for designers. I hired and mentored junior designers, supported collaboration across projects, and helped create a shared expectation for quality.
I also co-led a UX Community of Practice and hosted quarterly workshops for the broader organization. These sessions helped non-designers understand how UX contributed to product strategy, delivery, accessibility, and user outcomes.
The goal was not to make everyone a designer. It was to give partners a shared language for making better product decisions.
Impact
Scaled the design team from 4 to 15 designers
Built shared UX and accessibility practices across 200+ stakeholders
Unified patterns across multiple enterprise applications through a hybrid design foundation
Improved design-to-development handoff efficiency by approximately 29%
Improved task completion and pattern adherence by approximately 28–31%, depending on the workflow measured
Increased user retention by approximately 18%, if this metric can be documented and clearly attributed to the work
Tradeoffs
I chose adoption over completeness. A fully bespoke design system would have been more cohesive in theory, but it would have taken longer to build and required teams to learn an entirely new framework.
I also chose lightweight documentation over a comprehensive process library. The organization needed useful guidance that teams could apply under real delivery pressure, not a perfect system that became a bottleneck.
This approach meant the foundation had to evolve over time, but it helped establish trust and made broader adoption possible.
What I Learned
This work changed how I think about design leadership. Improving UX maturity is not primarily about introducing more process. It is about creating the conditions for better decisions: shared patterns, clear standards, useful education, and enough trust for designers to be involved early.
The most successful systems were the ones people could actually use without waiting for permission or relying on a single design leader. That became the measure of whether the practice was scaling.