Summary
What do you do when Mergers and Acquisitions is your company’s growth strategy and all the products look different. Key design principle to solve this is UX Consistency. But how much consistency is needed? How can you engage all these different teams and align them on a common goal, especially in a decentralized product design environment? Lastly, having design alignment or a common design system is not enough, but ensuring that all the products implement the agreed design consistency across product. Learn how you can influence and scale to achieve balanced user experience across all products.
Key Insights
-
•
Balancing around 30-40% design consistency with 60-70% product-specific freedom prevents cookie-cutter products and fosters innovation.
-
•
Large companies with many acquisitions, like SAP with 72 and Palo Alto Networks with 16, face major design consistency challenges across diverse products.
-
•
Creating network groups with one designer from each product team promotes collaboration and democratic design decisions.
-
•
Visual elements like color palettes are an effective starting point for incremental consistency improvements.
-
•
Sharing consolidated screenshots of disparate products visually convinces leadership of the need for cohesion.
-
•
A service leadership model that fosters collaboration works better than authoritative command and control in achieving design alignment.
-
•
Addressing organizational, cultural, and strategic differences early prevents roadblocks during design consistency efforts.
-
•
Involving product management, engineering, and leadership ensures implementation commitments translate design decisions into production.
-
•
Measuring ROI in design is difficult but can focus on cost savings from reusing components and decreasing duplicate work.
-
•
Onboarding newly acquired companies early into the alignment process facilitates smoother design integration.
Notable Quotes
"Consistency is a key principle in design and in life; to achieve something you have to be consistent and disciplined."
"When things behave the same way, users don’t have to worry about what will happen—that’s the intuitive factor."
"Instead of aiming for 80% consistency, I believe 30-40% consistency with 60-70% freedom works better."
"Put all product screenshots together to clearly show that different products look different and must feel like one company."
"Changing the mindset takes time; like a big ship it takes hours to turn direction."
"Work with majority wins but don’t alienate minority teams; everyone has to sometimes compromise for the greater good."
"A service leadership approach means you’re here to help and orchestrate, not to command and control."
"Tracking implementation commitments after each design network group keeps momentum and accountability."
"Design talent is the most valuable asset; empowering them to be part of decisions retains and motivates them."
"Achieving coherency across products leads to less training, fewer support calls, and more users successfully adopting products."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"We live in a biosphere that’s collapsing, so maybe we should try life-centered design rather than just human-centered design."
Alison Rand Sarah BrooksScaling Impact with Service Design
March 25, 2021
"Managers were asking for user stories but hadn’t done any analysis or design — they didn’t understand the scope."
Carl TurnerYou Can Do This: Understand and Solve Organizational Problems to Jumpstart a Dead Project
March 28, 2023
"Data is like a black box. It’s owned by IT. I’m not allowed to know how it works, but I kind of resent that it introduces delays into my marketing processes."
Sarah FlamionComplex Problem? Add Clarity by Combining Research and Systems Thinking
March 31, 2020
"You prove value without asking for permission by running pilots and experiments, then move the entire team into the new direction if it works."
Silke Bochat5 Antifragile Strategies for a DesignOps 2.0
September 23, 2024
"Enterprise is sexy – that phrase helped me get at least one job."
Uday Gajendar Lada Gorlenko Dave Malouf Louis Rosenfeld Dan Willis10 Years of Enterprise UX: Reflecting on the community and the practice
June 18, 2025
"We got to get everybody to tell stories in the whole room."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
June 8, 2017
"We created recruitment events for underrepresented groups because it was harder for them to get permission and sign up in time otherwise."
Kara KaneCommunities of Practice for Civic Design
April 7, 2022
"What happens if research does not report into UX? What might happen if we uncouple research from UX?"
Nalini KotamrajuResearch After UX
March 25, 2024
"Please read our code of conduct to ensure everyone can be their fullest selves while respecting others."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 1, 2021
