Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
Summary
At a large U.S. federal agency, we've partnered across agency personnel, vendors, and contracts to build a single design culture that delivers an exceptional customer experience while meeting evolving business needs. We’ve built collaboration and critique rituals, tooling approaches, and design governance processes to organize 75+ designers into a unified practice all working together on a single, digital experience. We'll share what worked, what didn't, and provide a set of principles and tactics you can use right away – in any government agency – to begin building your own cohesive design practice, even when your ecosystem is anything but cohesive.
Key Insights
-
•
Centralizing research participant recruitment and documentation streamlines user access for multiple contract teams, improving research quality and inclusivity.
-
•
Collaboration across contractor boundaries is critical and can be facilitated by shared communication tools like Slack and regular cross-team meetings.
-
•
Normalizing design tools and processes across contractors ensures consistency, speeds onboarding, and prevents duplicated effort in maintaining design systems.
-
•
A governance-driven collaboration cycle with strict adherence to accessibility and user experience standards is required to launch VA digital applications.
-
•
Making design work and patterns visible early prevents redundant efforts and clarifies which user problems are already addressed.
-
•
Dedicated centralized expert teams in accessibility, content, IA, and QA free designers to specialize and maintain quality in large-scale enterprise projects.
-
•
Legal constraints, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act, limit research interactions, requiring balancing ethical concerns with agile user research.
-
•
Contracts structured around individual products rather than whole user experiences create challenges in coordination and require extra collaborative effort.
-
•
Fostering psychological safety and informal feedback venues enables design teams from multiple companies to share work openly and improve outcomes.
-
•
The VA’s approach has led to millions of veterans using self-service tools monthly, highlighting the impact of cohesive government design practices.
Notable Quotes
"Throwing a potluck sounds easy until you realize you don’t have a group that magically reads each other’s minds, resulting in a random table of snack foods."
"Our digital experience group acts like hosts and planners making sure veterans sit down to a cohesive, inclusive meal, not just disparate dishes."
"We have over 30 contracting teams spread across roughly 10 vendors all working on parts of the veteran experience landscape."
"A government designer aims to reduce UX variation while a contractor may optimize only their single product, creating potential conflicts."
"Reliable access to veterans and other users is fundamental to running quality, inclusive research across many teams and products."
"Slack channels and weekly meetings encourage cross-contract collaboration, avoiding duplication and sharing learnings across teams."
"The collaboration cycle requires following standards for accessibility, content, design system usage, and IA or you don’t launch your product."
"We treat our shared tooling and design system as a product with a dedicated team maintaining reusable components and governance."
"Designers contribute experimental patterns back to the design system early, making their work visible even before full validation."
"We’ve seen self-service tool usage grow from hundreds to millions of veterans served monthly after launching a unified VA platform."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Splitting people leadership and functional leadership with a brick wall in between is broken and unsustainable."
Peter MerholzThe Mysterious Case of the Missing UX Career Path
August 25, 2022
"About 20% of users shown our Net Promoter Score survey provide written feedback that can be analyzed for improvements."
Alan Williams Rose DeebDesigning essential financial services for those in need
February 10, 2022
"If you’re not in Slack, you’re missing out on the party."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
June 11, 2021
"We are ultimately status-seeking monkeys, and our attachment to work is largely about our perceived role and rank."
Dave GrayConnection, Community, and the Future of Work
May 28, 2026
"Showing where you’re using research more visibly creates a virtuous cycle of adoption and impact."
Jon Fukuda Jake Burghardt Jose Coronado Natalie Dunbar Denise TillesAll the Ops: Successful cross-functional collaboration
September 10, 2025
"Don’t be ideal. Do better. Start by making a public goal to create accountability and internal conversations."
Saara Kamppari-MillerInclusive Design is DesignOps
September 29, 2021
"Choosing to remain silent is still a choice; agency means owning how and if you participate."
Sahibzada MayedThe Politics of Radical Research: A Manifesto
March 27, 2023
"A lot of design frameworks funnel thinking narrowly, which feels like baked-in limitations of human-centered design."
Sheryl CababaIntegrating Systems Thinking Into Your Practice as a Designer
October 1, 2025
"We use the RICE method—reach, impact, confidence divided by effort—to prioritize customer requests in our sprints."
Smitha Papolu Nova Wehman-Brown Melissa Schmidt Adam MenterTheme 3 Discussion
June 4, 2019
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What are common organizational or legal challenges when designing for warmth and community connection?
Why is the concept of making the invisible visible critical in ethical AI design practices?
What are the challenges of demand charges in residential solar rate plans and how can they be managed automatically?