Team Building
Role
Director of UX → Vice President of UX → Interim CPO
Scenario
Post–private equity acquisition communications platform operating across FCC-regulated B2C services and enterprise B2B products, supporting in-person and remote interpretation and transcription globally.
Goals
Build a UX organization, research function, and operating model from zero inside a historically engineering-led company.
Following a private equity acquisition, the company was operating in a highly regulated environment where accessibility failures carried legal, financial, and reputational consequences. Product decisions, however, were still driven largely by executive opinion.
There was:
No UX strategy
No formal research practice
No product analytics beyond minutes billed to the FCC
No shared design language across products
Engineering teams worked independently, optimizing for delivery speed rather than outcomes. Features shipped inconsistently across platforms. Teams were busy, but progress was slow. Opportunities for both the business and customers were being missed, and the risk increased.
Leadership believed the business understood its users because it could measure usage. What was missing was insight into how people moved through workflows, where friction occurred, and why certain features failed to deliver value.
Without changing how decisions were made, the company would continue investing in work without clear evidence it solved real problems.
I was hired to build UX from the ground up.
At the outset, I had no authority over what features were built or how work was prioritized. UX was treated as a downstream function. Engineering and product decisions were already set by the time design became involved.
The challenge was not about resourcing, as much as it was about building credibility. UX needed to demonstrate value in a way that changed how teams planned, not just how interfaces looked.
The first and most important decision was to make research and product data a prerequisite for decision-making, even when that slowed teams down.
This meant:
Introducing user research before features were approved
Expanding feedback sources to include interpreters, support teams, and operational staff
Implementing product analytics to understand journeys and failure points, not just usage totals
Engineering teams believed existing metrics were sufficient. Legal and security teams were cautious about instrumentation. Executives were used to moving quickly based on experience. We moved forward anyway, because without evidence, speed was producing rework.
What this looked like in practice:
Worked with legal and security to approve analytics tooling under FCC requirements
Partnered with engineers to instrument fragmented platforms
Shifted roadmap discussions from output to funnel behavior
Used research findings in planning reviews to replace assumption-based debates
Rather than waiting to be invited, I made UX visible in executive discussions.
I built direct relationships with leaders, framed user issues in terms of operational risk and revenue impact, and brought concrete evidence into conversations that previously relied on opinion.
UX stopped being viewed as a delivery function, and it became part of how decisions were evaluated. That shift had a greater effect on product and engineering behavior than any process document.
How influence was built:
Reframed usability issues as compliance and cost risks
Used real user data in executive reviews
Took accountability for outcomes, not just recommendations
Positioned UX as a decision input, not a service
Instead of focusing on individual wins, I prioritized infrastructure that could support multiple teams and products.
That included:
A research pipeline that worked within privacy and regulatory limits
Design checkpoints integrated into delivery workflows
A shared design system adopted across 20+ platforms
The goal was consistency and reliability, and not getting paralyzed by perfection.
Design system impact:
Reduced design inconsistency across products
Decreased engineering rework caused by one-off solutions
Created a shared vocabulary between design, product, and engineering
Made accessibility a baseline expectation
One debated initiative was building a self-service portal for enterprise customers to request interpreters, replacing a manual call- and email-based workflow.
Many stakeholders believed the existing process was adequate. Beta testing with smaller, high-volume enterprise customers showed clear improvements in customer satisfaction and request success.
Later, while serving as Interim CPO, I made the decision to pause further investment in the portal due to cost constraints and organizational readiness. That allowed product, design, and research teams to be redirected to higher-priority work and preserved roles during restructuring.
Both decisions were appropriate given the context at the time.
Why this tradeoff mattered:
Early validation demonstrated customer value
Operational changes lagged behind product readiness
Budget pressure required sharper prioritization
Preserving teams outweighed feature completion
UX became involved earlier in planning and prioritization
Product teams relied less on opinion and more on evidence
Research informed roadmap decisions
Design systems reduced fragmentation and rework
Design-to-release cycles improved by 25–30%
UX shifted from a support role to a decision partner.
What Continued After I Left:
After additional rounds of layoffs the UX team remained intact
Research practices continued
Product decisions still required evidence
Competitive analysis and usage insights remained standard inputs
UX proves its value when it becomes difficult to remove. The work endured because it was built into how the company operated.
The goal wasn’t to build a team that needed constant defense. It was to build systems that made better decisions the default. That’s the kind of work I aim to do.
“
Candice Grijalva
Vice President of Product
