Work I've led, and what it taught me.

A year-long engagement with a Fortune 50 medtech company consolidating a fragmented regional landscape onto Microsoft Dynamics, replacing everything from a deprecated legacy CRM to spreadsheets and email. Our side owned blueprinting, Dynamics expertise, data architecture, and content. A third-party systems integrator owned the build. The client directed through multiple technical product owners. Five active workstreams covered the business from Sales to Regulatory Education, with a mobile sales application and inline AI assistants in scope across the platform.

I joined as UX lead on the consulting side just as the project moved from blueprinting into execution. The client had its own UX team that had carried upstream research alongside blueprinting, but they were understaffed for execution at this scale. I came in to build and lead that delivery team. The client, platform configuration, and design system itself are covered by NDA; what follows focuses on leadership, decisions, and outcomes.

The execution phase needed UX delivery the upstream team wasn't sized to provide. Several calls were mine to make: where UX would play across the workstreams, what cadence design work would run on inside an SI-led build, how design decisions would survive handoff into sprint refinement.

Dynamics is a rigid SaaS surface, so the work that mattered most was experience and workflow rather than visual craft. Reusable elements across workstreams. Field order and definition. Page-to-page flows. Feature-level definitions. The placement and behavior of AI assistants in the mobile sales concept and service flows.

Leading the team. I built a delivery cadence around regional timezones, scaling at one to two designers per workstream depending on need, and coordinated with an offshore director on staffing and workloads. As contract negotiations reshaped the engagement, designers came and went. I focused on continuity across transitions, including bringing as many of the original designers back as scope expanded. I personally led two workstreams, and oversaw capable designers leading day-to-day on the others.

Leading delivery across a three-party engagement. The structural challenge was that the people defining the experience and the people building it sat on opposite sides of a contractual seam. My team defined how UX stories landed in JIRA and how they were spec'd for sprint-by-sprint refinement, working with the larger blueprinting team and the SI to translate design decisions into something that could actually be built without custom code. We pushed back on the SI when the work required it: on AI assistant placement, on UX debt addressed per sprint, on design system adoption. Several escalations needed the TPOs and the client's UX director pulled in to align dev teams. I took those conversations on directly.

Leading the UX work. Workstream prioritization came first. Sales was the workstream the client would judge our work by. It had to land first, and land hard. We moved quickly with multiple designers and in-person workshops. The others got design attention in the order their dependencies and TPO timelines required. For the workstreams I lead, I participated in the research and workshops, mapped flows and field-level interaction patterns, and led Figma-based design and prototyping to surface issues before they became dev work and rework.

Designing AI around the user. Multiple workstreams had inline AI assistants in scope. The question was where AI genuinely helped people do their work and where it would just be in the way. We answered through rough personas, workshop feedback, and close attention to where users were actually slowed by retrieval or decision support. Where AI added clarity, it stayed. Where it added a layer between the user and a task they already understood, we cut it.

The design system came together later than it should have, and once it did, it became the most valuable single artifact we produced. I led the design and codification alongside my team, building from the immutable Dynamics' atomic-level tokens up through reusable templates and page-level designs. Templates were defined so reusable designs doubled as reusable code components, with guidance for when and how to use each element. The point was controlling rework during build and maintenance burden after rollout, while leaving deliberate room for regional variation where the work required it.

Consistency where it helped. Flexibility where it didn't.

The design system became the consistency backbone the global rollout had been missing. Dev rework dropped meaningfully once it was in place, and the SI's velocity on subsequent sprints improved as a result. Patterns mapped directly between Figma and code: less translation work, fewer interpretation calls during refinement, a single source of truth on both sides of the contractual seam.

The Sales workstream's early output landed harder than anyone expected. The future-state AI-infused prototype we led was showcased during the client's global sales meeting with a polished commercial-style introduction. That moment did more for client confidence in the UX direction and the overall long-term transformation project than any deliverable to that point.

The engagement doubled in length from its original six-month scope. Working with project and client leadership, I helped shape the staffing and scope for the extension. Doubling the engagement says more about what the work was worth to them than any metric I could offer here.

The team came out stronger than it started. The associate designer who led Sales was given independent workstream leadership and is now positioned for promotion. Two designers brought on during the original engagement were retained or brought back as scope expanded. One offshore designer hit a difficult stretch with delivery cadence and stakeholder communication; with coaching and some hard conversations, they came out with a noticeably stronger, more authoritative voice, particularly with the client and the SI, and are now positioned for promotion themselves.

Three designers came out of this engagement ready for more than they came in with. I coached them through it; they did the harder part. That's what I'm proudest of.

The transformation itself. The platform created the opportunity. The UX work determined how much of it users actually got.

The design system came together later than it should have. Before it did, the first half of the work was spent solving the same problems in parallel across workstreams. Some of that was unavoidable given how the engagement started and the workstreams varying timelines. But not all of it was.

Running this again, I'd lock the structural commitments, the atomic patterns and the rules for when templates apply, as a first priority, even if the full library took longer to fill in. The cost wasn't visible at the time. It became visible in how much faster the team moved once the system was in place.

I should have distributed the pushback work more deliberately. Most of the difficult conversations with the SI came through me, which made sense in the moment given the stakes and the seniority of the people on the other side.

The cost was that I didn't build pushback capacity in the team as deliberately as I could have. The designers were capable of holding the line on day-to-day decisions, and I should have spent more time coaching them through those conversations rather than absorbing the harder ones myself.

The team would have grown faster if I'd been more deliberate about creating those moments earlier and more often.