Case Study: Transitioning NatWest’s Design Team to T-Shaped Product Designers
Background
When I joined NatWest, the design team structure relied heavily on IR35 outside contractors, hired as specialists — UI designers, UX designers, researchers — each focusing narrowly on their domain. This worked in large, waterfall-style projects but was inefficient for modern, agile, cross-functional teams.
As NatWest pushed to adopt a more product-led approach, the need for leaner, autonomous teams became clear. The existing model of needing multiple design specialists per squad created inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and blurred accountability.
The Challenge
My goal was to reshape the design team into T-Shaped Product Designers — generalists with a strong specialism — capable of individually supporting cross-functional teams. This would reduce team size, speed up delivery, and promote ownership, while still maintaining depth of expertise where it mattered.
The Approach: Building a T-Shaped Design Team
Transitioning to Full-Time Employees
I led the transition of 4 IR35 contractors to full-time employees, securing long-term investment in their growth and team alignment. I also hired 2 new designers to fill capability gaps.
Skill Benchmarking & Career Development
I designed and implemented a custom skills framework to benchmark each designer’s competencies, identify strengths and development areas, and guide their progression toward T-Shaped roles.
Upskilling & Knowledge Sharing
Conducted targeted workshops where specialists shared expertise across the team
Encouraged pairing sessions for hands-on learning across UX, UI, and research
Created stretch projects to push designers outside their comfort zones and broaden their skills
Creating Accountability & Autonomy
By embedding T-Shaped designers into cross-functional squads, I fostered a culture of end-to-end ownership, where designers were responsible for driving solutions from research through to delivery, avoiding hand-offs and role silos.
Balancing Generalist & Specialist Skills
While broadening skills, each designer retained a core specialism (e.g., micro-animations, UI polish) and became the go-to expert in that area, allowing the team to continuously upskill each other.
Why I chose a T-shaped product design team model
I deliberately shaped the product design team to be made up of T-shaped designers, where each designer is expected to cover the full product design process—from discovery to delivery—while also having a personal specialism.
This ensures the team remains flexible, autonomous, and end-to-end capable, while also giving us depth in certain critical areas like motion design, research, data visualisation, or visual design.
It creates a healthy balance between generalist capability and specialist excellence.
Having individual strengths allows designers to be the go-to person for their craft specialism, offering expert support to others when needed, enhancing both the quality of work and team collaboration. It also encourages cross-pollination of skills within the team, as designers learn from each other's spikes, ultimately lifting the standard of our work across the board.
Why I cycle designers between cross-functional teams
I also believe it's important to rotate designers between cross-functional teams (CFTs) on a structured, but flexible cadence, typically every quarter or six months depending on the timing and relevance of the product space.
This achieves a few things:
Injecting fresh perspectives: Designers bring new energy, approaches, and ideas to teams that may have become too close to a problem space.
Preventing knowledge silos: By rotating designers, we avoid critical knowledge, insights, and design patterns being locked within specific CFTs, ensuring learnings and best practices flow across the organisation.
Growing well-rounded designers: On a personal level, designers broaden their exposure to different domains (e.g., consumer, enterprise, platform), problem spaces, and stakeholders, making them more versatile, empathetic, and valuable designers in the long term.
However, it’s critical to respect personal motivations and preferences. Not every designer will be motivated to work on every type of product. For example, someone might not have any interest in working on consumer-facing experiences—and that’s okay.
Therefore, I view designer rotations as optional and collaborative discussions, not mandated reshuffles. Importantly, any transition should be planned carefully to avoid disrupting project delivery or KPIs.
Mindset-Driven Hiring Process
For new hires, I designed a rigorous, two-part onsite interview process (1hr 30m) to assess critical skills:
Part 1: Past Work Presentation (45 mins)
Candidate presents a top project, showcasing end-to-end involvement
Focus on problem identification, product goals, structured process, research use, and design outcomes
Demonstrates product thinking, interaction design, visual polish, proactivity, and self-awareness
Part 2: Whiteboard Challenge (45 mins)
A live problem-solving exercise testing product thinking, UX/UI approach, and collaboration
Assesses autonomy, creativity, structured thinking, and communication under pressure
Throughout both stages, I emphasised mindset, ownership, and versatility — ensuring hires could thrive as T-Shaped Designers in cross-functional squads.
I prioritised hiring individuals with a growth mindset and critical thinking abilities. The interview process focused on collaborative problem-solving rather than traditional portfolio or UI task assessments.
Results & Impact
Successfully transitioned from a specialist-heavy to a T-Shaped product design team
Enabled lean, high-performing teams with individual design ownership
Improved delivery speed, reduced dependencies, and increased team agility
Fostered a startup mentality within a large enterprise
Maintained depth of craft through an “expert within a generalist” approach
Established a culture of continuous learning and shared excellence
Summary
This transformation was not just about team structure — it was about creating a culture of autonomy, versatility, and growth. By moving to a T-Shaped model, we built a design team that could support NatWest’s agile product ambitions while elevating the individual careers of each designer through continuous upskilling.
TLDR:
At NatWest, I transitioned a team of design specialists from IR35 contractors to full-time T-Shaped Product Designers, enabling leaner, autonomous squads, faster delivery, and a culture of continuous upskilling — while retaining depth of expertise.