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
"If you haven’t taken command and control of your story someone else has, and it’s likely not the story you want to be told."
Jon FukudaStorytelling for DesignOps
August 17, 2023
"A simplifier can explain complex situations in the easiest way possible without losing nuance."
Kate SternScaling Learning for the Future
September 9, 2022
"You are the reason why we are able to have such high quality programming that we do have at this conference this week."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
June 11, 2021
"In decentralized teams, the risk is redundant insights and lack of cumulative knowledge."
Jen Cardello Dr. Shadi Janansefat Alex WrightCurating insight: Strategies for integrating knowledge across research functions
March 11, 2025
"Personas tend to not give you those deep insights that you would get from user research and user testing."
Kate KalcevichDesigning inclusively with AI
June 5, 2024
"Research teams need to be strategic about building tools to do ethical research, not just diverse."
Jemma Ahmed Robert Fabricant Sean McKay Llewyn Paine Kate Towsey Noah BondTheme Panel
March 11, 2025
"Accessibility audits check the box for compliance; usability testing ensures a good user experience."
Elana Chapman Li Wen Huang Divyen Sanganee Annabel WeinerGetting started with accessibility research
February 20, 2025
"Nothing about us without us is the mantra we embrace when doing inclusive design operations."
Saara Kamppari-MillerDesignOps for Inclusive Design and Accessibility
May 26, 2022
"A kaleidoscope helps us see changing patterns to perceive new images and pursue new possibilities."
Etienne FangPower of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform
December 16, 2019
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What roles do narrative and shared sense-making play in measuring learning within organizations?
How can one service designer drive AI integration in an organization lacking a design team?
What evidence exists that service design contributes to business outcomes such as customer retention and digital transformation success?