Revitalizing a Design Org: From Siloed Teams to Strategic Influence

Background

When I joined Fairmatic in August 2024, my manager had just left, and the design org was operating without direction — functioning in a service-based manner and lacking trust from the broader organization.

The Problems

The design org was stuck in a recurring pattern of churn and incomplete projects. As a result:

• We lacked a clear direction or vision as a team
• Design was seen as a service function, with unclear value to the business
• Designers worked in silos, disconnected from the rest of the org
• We had little to no influence on product decisions, leading to a growing mountain of design debt
• There was no roadmap, no benchmarks, and no measurable goals for design in 2025 — making it difficult to secure space for design-led initiatives

Digging Deeper

Given the widespread issues, I spent the first three months talking to stakeholders and leaders across the organization to understand what was and wasn’t working — both in the design workflow and the customer experience. Through this exercise, we uncovered critical issues:

• Process gaps — from lack of collaboration to unclear developer handoff
• User pain points — accumulated over time but never addressed due to roadmap limitations
• No standard for what a “good” customer or product experience looked like
• No long-term product vision — leading to short-term, patchwork solutions
• Zero user testing — meaning we often launched blindly and paid for it later
• No proactive systems — most efforts went into reacting to fires rather than preventing them

Closing the Gaps

As this project is signed under NDA, contact me at adithkvn@gmail.com

With time left before the 2025 planning cycle began, I partnered with design, product, and engineering to start addressing these issues. By mid-way through the effort, we realized that broader stakeholder alignment was key to long-term adoption. Key initiatives included:

• A new cross-functional ways-of-working framework for design, product, and engineering
• A benchmarking system to measure UX quality across all products
• A customer research panel for pre-launch testing
• Defined 2025 product design visions for all major products
• Dedicated bandwidth for design-led experience improvements within each POD
• A central insights repository for all user research and roadmap prioritization
• A refreshed design system, integrated into Storybook
• A restructured design tooling budget and introduction of speed-enhancing tools
• Clearly defined OKRs and success metrics for the design team

With support from our VP of Product, we presented these ideas to the executive team, including the CEO, and showcased the plan at an all-hands before formally incorporating them into our roadmap and ways of working.

Achievements & Impact

• For the first time, design had its own roadmap — presented org-wide
• We launched the first version of our design system, integrated into Storybook
• Benchmarked all major products and identified key UX improvement opportunities
• Conducted user testing and created an insights repo now linked to all PRDs and customer case studies
• Saved $7,000 by cutting unused design tools and seats
• Established a culture of continuous improvement — even developers proactively submitted UX improvements
• Significantly increased cross-functional trust, with feedback loops built into each project stage, raising the bar for product quality

Shortcomings

• The vision was ambitious — and while parts were implemented, full adoption was tough due to the scale of change
• The design system saw limited adoption, with “speed” often cited as a reason to bypass it
• Our Innovation Lab idea didn’t gain traction due to limited stakeholder bandwidth

Learnings

• Communicate early and often — aligning stakeholders at the start prevents resistance later
• Start small, implement early — waiting until the end makes change harder to drive
• When introducing major changes, phased rollouts and quick wins can go a long way in building momentum.