Embedded Expertise

Embedded product design leadership

I was brought in as an embedded product design lead to support a young, fast-growing product team navigating competing stakeholder expectations, an evolving product vision, and growing pressure to improve customer experience at pace.

Rather than acting as an external consultant or delivery-only designer, I worked closely alongside product and engineering to diagnose underlying issues, surface blind spots, and help the team build shared understanding — while continuing to move delivery forward.

This work focused on creating clarity under ambiguity, aligning decisions around evidence rather than opinion, and helping the team move from assumptions to informed action within a tight timeframe.

What I noticed.

Although the team was actively building and improving the product, decision-making was largely driven by instinct, stakeholder opinion, and comparisons to competitors — often without shared understanding of why certain patterns worked, or whether they addressed the organisation’s real problems.

There were strong views across leadership, including a clear design vision at the top, but limited alignment on priorities, success metrics, or the root causes behind customer dissatisfaction.

The product had been live for a relatively short time, yet expectations were already high. Teams were moving quickly, but without a clear, shared picture of user needs, behavioural patterns, or where friction was truly occurring.

Signals of misalignment.

Several consistent signals emerged as the work progressed:

Fragmented assumptions about users

Statements about the “typical customer” were widely shared, but rarely validated. Decisions were being made based on who stakeholders thought the product was for, rather than who was actually using it and why.

Competing stakeholder priorities

Different parts of the organisation were pulling the product in different directions — often influenced by competitor behaviour or personal preference — without a clear framework for evaluating trade-offs.

Surface-level problem solving

Symptoms were being addressed (visual changes, feature tweaks), while deeper systemic issues affecting customer experience remained largely unexplored.

Limited shared evidence

Data existed across analytics tools and customer feedback, but it wasn’t being brought together in a way that supported confident, aligned decision-making.

Ways of working under strain.

The pace of delivery meant there was little space to step back and examine the bigger picture. Engineering and product were already committed to building improvements, while leadership wanted reassurance that investment would lead to meaningful outcomes.

This created tension: the team needed to keep momentum, but also needed clarity. Without shared insight, there was a risk of doubling down on the wrong solutions — or optimising areas that weren’t the real source of customer frustration.

My role became less about “designing screens” and more about creating the conditions for better decisions to happen quickly and with confidence.

The challenge.

The challenge wasn’t a lack of effort or capability. It was introducing clarity, alignment, and evidence without slowing the team down.

Framing the opportunity

Rather than positioning the work as a redesign or feature push, the opportunity was framed around understanding the experience end-to-end — identifying what was genuinely blocking customer satisfaction, and what would meaningfully move the needle.

Approach

Over a six-week period, I led an intensive, embedded discovery and synthesis phase alongside ongoing delivery.

This included:

Deep customer research to validate assumptions and uncover overlooked friction
Interviews with the leadership team to understand goals, constraints, and decision drivers
A detailed data review using analytics and behavioural tools to identify drop-offs, patterns, and pain points
A UX audit of the existing experience to surface inconsistencies, duplication, and missed opportunities

Insights were played back early and often, helping leadership see where perception and reality diverged — particularly around issues that sat outside the immediate product surface, such as third-party delivery dependencies.

From insight to action

Findings were translated into tangible outputs the team could act on quickly:

A lightweight, Figma-based component library grounded in existing engineering patterns
Low-fidelity flows to align on direction before committing to detail
Higher-fidelity prototypes to support handover, stakeholder confidence, and future funding decisions

Where appropriate, I used assistive tooling — including rapid prototyping and lightweight AI-supported exploration — to make ideas tangible quickly, reduce ambiguity, and support discussion. These tools were used to accelerate understanding and alignment, not replace judgement or delivery discipline.

Trade-offs and constraints

Time was tight, and not every idea could be pursued. The focus remained on surfacing the most impactful issues, giving the team clarity on what mattered most, and leaving them with foundations they could build on after my involvement ended.

Reflection.

This work reinforced the value of embedded design leadership in moments of uncertainty. The biggest impact didn’t come from a single artefact or design decision, but from helping teams slow down just enough to see clearly — and then move forward with confidence.

Being close to the work, the people, and the constraints made it possible to surface uncomfortable truths early, align stakeholders around evidence, and turn insight into action without derailing momentum.

For me, this kind of embedded work sits at the intersection of trust, judgement, and systems thinking. It’s most effective when design leadership is less about control, and more about helping teams see what’s really happening — and giving them the confidence to act on it.

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