Case Study: Collaborative Leadership in Cross-Functional Teams
Background
As a design leader, I believe the best product outcomes happen when design, product, and engineering leaders work collaboratively — sharing goals, solving problems together, and pushing each other to deliver impactful work. Strong relationships across disciplines are essential to build high-performing, empowered teams that can move fast, make decisions autonomously, and continuously improve.
Building Strong Relationships
Collaboration isn’t a one-off event — it’s a relationship built over time. I foster this by:
Holding regular 1:1s and team meetings with Product Managers and Engineering Leads.
Understanding their roadmaps, KPIs, and OKRs to align design priorities with business and technical goals.
Maintaining an approachable and open leadership style, making it easier for teams to engage, ask questions, and involve design in decision-making early.
The goal is to ensure that designers and their counterparts in cross-functional teams (CFTs) are aligned, proactive, and collectively responsible for delivering great user experiences.
Empowering Designers in Cross-Functional Teams
I empower designers to:
Make decisions and progress quickly without waiting for leadership approval.
Take ownership of their work while closely collaborating with their PM and Engineering partners.
Solve problems in new, meaningful, and user-centered ways, challenging assumptions and driving smarter solutions.
Agile tools like Scrum Boards and daily stand-ups are used to foster transparency, highlight blockers, and encourage constant interaction and discussion across disciplines.
Process & Quality Assurance
To maintain high-quality design delivery:
I ensure Design QA is a formal step before production, reviewing visual design, micro-interactions, and copy for consistency with handed-off files.
Designers follow a design handover checklist to ensure all use cases and edge cases are considered.
We maintain a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) for designs, using Overflow to map the entire app — including all use cases and edge flows. This has been invaluable for Product, Data, and UX teams to analyse drop-off points and track changes.
Data-Driven, Customer-First Approach
Design decisions are grounded in user insights, behavioural data, and measurable outcomes.
We leverage tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Liner, Qualtrics, and UserTesting to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback.
This ensures we validate assumptions, measure impact, and stay focused on solving real user problems.
Agile & Iterative Mindset
I champion the Double Diamond Design Process to support an agile, iterative workflow:
Discover: Research, interviews, ethnographic studies, and data analysis.
Define: Problem framing, user journeys, impact metrics.
Develop: Wireframes, high-fidelity designs, co-creation workshops.
Deliver: Dev handover, build, launch, monitor impact.
By combining divergent and convergent thinking, we avoid jumping to solutions too quickly and ensure we're always solving the right problem.
Scalability & Long-Term Impact
The collaborative practices I put in place — shared processes, regular team critiques, scrum documentation, and empowered CFTs — ensure the design team can scale effectively while maintaining speed and quality.
This approach allows us to stay lean, agile, and customer-focused, while continuously improving both the product and team culture.
TLDR:
I lead by building strong relationships between Design, Product, and Engineering, fostering empowered, data-driven, and collaborative cross-functional teams who solve real user problems and deliver high-quality outcomes at speed.