Discussion
Summary
The session includes several UX and product experts, including Ariel, Ross, Mark, and others, sharing rich insights on cross-organizational collaboration and design practices. Ariel details a comprehensive 75-page journey map he developed for a city government project, emphasizing the importance of creating shared documentation and safe spaces for policy conversations. Ross shares his transition from engineering to UX driven by user stories and empathy, while Mark explains how APIs help coordinate requests for design resources across large teams, ensuring that workload is manageable and transparent. The group discusses techniques for empathizing with higher-level stakeholders, including understanding how they’re measured and aligning design goals with their success metrics. They tackle maintaining continuity as teams and members change by recommending thorough handoff documents and horizontal roles overseeing core experiences. Agile challenges are addressed through dual-track agile methodologies and A/B testing, allowing iterative design in short sprints. The importance of including support teams in design feedback loops is highlighted, with suggestions for tagging support tickets for visibility. Ariel also speaks about building an internal community of practice and design kits to encourage civic service design culture. Additionally, small human gestures like sending thank you cards across silos prove effective in fostering empathy. The panel underscores making documentation accessible and integrating technical writers within UX teams. The conversation weaves in practical examples and cultural tactics from companies like Honeywell, HP, and government agencies, all focusing on bridging organizational silos to deliver better user-centered products.
Key Insights
-
•
A detailed journey map for government services can span 75 pages and serve as a critical shared internal document to build understanding across commissioners, staff, and providers, as Ariel described.
-
•
Successful collaboration in government requires designers to learn enough policy to engage as trusted peers, creating safe spaces to surface real issues and invite constructive change.
-
•
Ross transitioned from engineering to UX by discovering inspirational user stories in product feedback that generated empathy and motivation to improve user experience.
-
•
Mark’s team created lightweight 'APIs' for other teams to request UX resources, including tracking states like accepted, in progress, or rejected, helping manage demand and transparency.
-
•
Empathizing with stakeholders higher up the org involves understanding how they are measured and what success means for their role, enabling better alignment of design goals.
-
•
To maintain continuity across feature teams with turnover, special onboarding sessions and 'going away' documents are critical handoff rituals that save time and preserve context.
-
•
Dual-track agile separates design and product discovery (one track) from development sprints (another), giving designers more runway to iterate and validate ideas.
-
•
Including support teams in scrums or regular meetings improves visibility of design-related customer issues; tagging support tickets enables focused review of design feedback.
-
•
Simple gestures like sending physical thank you cards across organizational silos can foster empathy and build cross-team relationships beyond technology.
-
•
Making documentation and toolkits in plain language, avoiding jargon, broadens access for cross-disciplinary teams and elevates the value of information design within UX.
Notable Quotes
"The consolidated view is really the invitation in to help get people excited and also help them see that we've created documentation that didn't exist previously."
"As a designer and leader in this space, I've had to learn a lot about policy so I can come in and have really deep discussions with policy folks as a peer."
"I started just searching for product name to look for bugs, but then found inspirational stories that helped me build empathy for users."
"We created APIs so people can submit ideas or resource requests in a simple structure, and then track their status from accepted to rejected."
"When I talk to stakeholders, I try to understand how they are measured and what success means for their role in the company."
"When someone swaps out on a feature team, that event needs a special onboarding: briefings and whiteboard sessions to transfer knowledge."
"Dual track agile means you have the dev sprint track and a separate design/product track that leads the dev track by several cycles."
"Invite support people to scrums or monthly engineering reviews so design can get visibility into common customer issues."
"Sending real physical thank you cards across silos surprises people and builds empathy and openness beyond what technology can do."
"We wrote our toolkits in plain English so people understand the tactics without getting lost in jargon—they can learn the jargon later."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"At Stanford’s d.school, we got the religion: design thinking could be bigger than just about products."
Julie BaherCulture Change—My Journey
May 14, 2015
"You have to ask specific, very precise questions, not big general ones, to get useful AI results."
Karen McGrane Jeff EatonAI for Information Architects: Are the robots coming for our jobs?
November 21, 2024
"Going from 100 to 200 people, suddenly product managers started hearing from a dozen people a week with conflicting requests."
Shipra KayanHow we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
September 30, 2021
"The farther away you are from the CEO or GM, the less happy and healthy your organization tends to be."
Peter MerholzThe 2025 State of UX/Design Organizational Health
November 12, 2025
"Data can be seductive, but focusing only on clicks risks sacrificing the user perspective."
Christian Crumlish Aditi Ruiz Johanna Kollmann Catt SmallMorning Insights Panel
December 6, 2022
"I learned about gross pay equity between me and my white counterpart despite doing more work."
Lisanne NormanWhy I Left Research
March 27, 2023
"Being humble enough to ask a competitor for feedback changed everything and led directly to job offers."
Corey LongHiring in DesignOps: A Critical Study on How to Hire and Get Hired
September 23, 2024
"No amount of power is enough to make a wide-ranging agenda move forward on its own."
Sarah BarrettThe "How" of Enterprise Information Architecture
June 6, 2023
"Ethics isn’t just about empathy during research, it’s every step where humans are involved."
Megan Blocker Marieke McCloskey Renee ReidPositioning insight: Structuring teams, roles and careers for a changing research landscape
March 13, 2025
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can organizations prevent design system knowledge from being an undocumented API surface reliant on specific individuals?
How can designers protect themselves when challenging toxic organizational cultures?
In what ways do rough sketches invite iteration rather than defensiveness compared to polished diagrams?