Leading the UX Team

In 2026, I've further expanded my role to lead and shape up the internal UX team. Because the team is small and new, we needed system and process put in first in order to maintain a healthy and quality UX ecosystem.

Leading the internal UX team

As we didn't have an established UX team before, with new designers joining, I started leading the internal UX team. I believe that long term values that we can provide as a team stem from having high quality and grounded fundamentals, so my early focus went into the underlying structure. Examples include building out a shared component library, working conventions, book of work management, and documentations.

Team of 3.5 UX designers, over 1 year
The team started off with a sole designer (me) 3 years ago

Shared component library

Set up and maintained a shared component and pattern library so common patterns were defined once and reused across applications, rather than rebuilt per file. This reduced visual drift and made design handoff and updates more predictable.

Component library adoption grew 82% over the year, with 30 new components and 1,500+ component insertions across our design files.

Weekly Show & Tell

Ran weekly Show & Tell sessions where designers walked through in-progress work, which has been helping tremendously with the team being newly formed with designers of varied knowledge level of the application. This also surfaced overlapping patterns early and gave the team a regular point to agree on shared solutions instead of diverging across products.

Book of Work Management

Took the initiative of creating and maintaining the UX book of work for the team by proactively collaborating with the Product Owner, Business Analysts, Engineering Managers, and the Business Stakeholders. This has helped our team in cutting down obscurity in estimating and understanding the bandwidth of the team, as well as ensuring efficient maximization of our resources. This also added more transparency around the amount of work we product in the UX team with a clear view and allocated time for each design process (research, design, feedback, handover).

Documentation and conventions

Documented working conventions in Figma — atomic component structure, Auto Layout usage, and file organization — so the practices were written down and repeatable rather than passed on informally.

Leading the internal UX team

As we didn't have an established UX team before, with new designers joining, I started leading the internal UX team. I believe that long term values that we can provide as a team stem from having high quality and grounded fundamentals, so my early focus went into the underlying structure. Examples include building out a shared component library, working conventions, book of work management, and documentations.

Team of 3.5 UX designers, over 1 year
The team started off with a sole designer (me) 3 years ago

Shared component library

Set up and maintained a shared component and pattern library so common patterns were defined once and reused across applications, rather than rebuilt per file. This reduced visual drift and made design handoff and updates more predictable.

Component library adoption grew 82% over the year, with 30 new components and 1,500+ component insertions across our design files.

Weekly Show & Tell

Ran weekly Show & Tell sessions where designers walked through in-progress work, which has been helping tremendously with the team being newly formed with designers of varied knowledge level of the application. This also surfaced overlapping patterns early and gave the team a regular point to agree on shared solutions instead of diverging across products.

Book of Work Management

Took the initiative of creating and maintaining the UX book of work for the team by proactively collaborating with the Product Owner, Business Analysts, Engineering Managers, and the Business Stakeholders. This has helped our team in cutting down obscurity in estimating and understanding the bandwidth of the team, as well as ensuring efficient maximization of our resources. This also added more transparency around the amount of work we product in the UX team with a clear view and allocated time for each design process (research, design, feedback, handover).

Documentation and conventions

Documented working conventions in Figma — atomic component structure, Auto Layout usage, and file organization — so the practices were written down and repeatable rather than passed on informally.