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
"Growth boards demonstrate you can have agile development at enterprise scale without rigid processes or devolving into chaos."
Jackie HoLead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards
January 8, 2024
"I wanted to be in a place where I was making people feel better, not worse."
Mary-Lynne WilliamsExit Interview #4: From Product Design Leadership to Sound Healing
January 14, 2026
"Gaming is where the graphical user interface once was—still largely inaccessible, with assistive tech as third-party add-ons."
Sam ProulxTo Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
September 9, 2022
"Staff working against long backlogs are inherently stretched for time, so engagement needs to be efficient and sensitive."
Ed MullenDesigning the Unseen: Enabling Institutions to Build Public Trust
November 16, 2022
"Too many companies wait until they think they know the solution to a problem and then they engage design as if design's only job is to make something look pretty."
Catt SmallMoving from Execution to Strategy as a Designer
December 6, 2022
"If you think of research methods as design patterns, the interview is a basic design pattern at the heart of most qualitative research methods."
Veevi RosensteinBuilding for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice
January 8, 2024
"The style component was developed in two minutes rather than taking a few days to create and document."
Ryan Matthew Alex KurchevBridging Design and Code: AI-Powered Design System Integration
September 11, 2025
"Designers often resist processes meant to streamline their work because it feels restrictive."
Kristin Skinner Kamdyn Moore8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
April 16, 2020
"Designers have the power to convene people around an idea and set the agenda."
Deanna Washington Tim Allen Jeff Courcelle John Maeda Matt Raw Erica TjaderScaling Success: Paving the Path from DesignOps to VP
October 4, 2023