Building a Human-Centered Design Process in Product Team

In February 2024, I joined Ukraine’s leading logistics company as Head of Design. While team leadership and hiring were part of my role, my main focus was to establish a scalable design process, which the existing workflow couldn’t support in a crisis-driven market.

Although I had experience leading and recruiting design teams, building a design process was a new challenge. I’m grateful to leadership for trusting me with this mission, and even more so to the teams who helped turn the transformation into reality.

The Setup & Research

The digital products department was developing three major products in parallel: the website, the mobile app, and the business portal. Each had its own customers and business goals. The team included 11 product managers, 3 project managers, the development team of 33 engineers, and the external design team of 5 contributors.

Before initiating any changes, I audited the existing workflow and conducted in-depth interviews with all stakeholders to gain a clearer understanding of the real situation on the ground. Here are the main pain points I identified.

Developers

Couldn’t easily locate the latest layouts, Figma files kept changing mid-development.
Felt their input wasn’t considered until things broke post-release.

Designers (External Team)

Received conflicting feedback that didn’t match original briefs.
Struggled to estimate timelines due to shifting requirements.
Saw their work ignored by developers who considered design impractical.

Product & Project Managers

Rarely got designs that matched their expectations on the first try.
Believed the design took too long.
Experienced builds that didn’t match the agreed mockups.

Leadership

Didn’t see expected outcomes delivered within deadlines.

After analyzing the challenges and gathering feedback, the next step was to shift toward a design process grounded in customer research rather than assumptions. Just as important was involving developers early in the ideation phase to ensure technical alignment from the start.

To improve predictability and transparency of that new approach, we planned to document and approve a standardized workflow. Finally, we aimed to bring more clarity and structure to design artifacts and documentation, reducing confusion and minimizing the risk of outdated materials being used.

Iteration 1: Process, Artifacts, and Structure

Designing and Visualizing the Process

As a result, the new design process introduced clearly defined roles, stages, sync points, and task formats, including:

A detailed task flow from initiation to handoff to development.
Diagrams showing team interactions.
Task templates and checklists for different cases (UI, research, hypotheses, etc.).
This gave the team a shared understanding of when a decision is “ready,” what counts as “approved,” what’s still in progress, and what quality handoff between stages looks like.

Structuring Design Artifacts

Together with the designers, we rethought how Figma files were organized. The old approach of one file per product (e.g. the mobile app) was no longer working: files loaded slowly, were cluttered, and hard to navigate.

We split designs into multiple files by functional blocks (e.g., “Onboarding,” “Map,” “Orders” etc.) with two versions per file: Sandbox — for iterations, discussions, and drafts; Dev file — for approved screens tied to the design system, ready for development.

All changes were co-created with the team during workshops, refined iteratively based on feedback, and aligned with managers, developers, and team leads, respecting their context and roles.

Challenges and Pitfalls during implementation

Teams kept sending tasks and feedback in Slack instead of Jira. Messaging feels faster than task managers.
New Figma files quickly got chaotic and hard to navigate.
Research was conducted but lacked a systematic approach and wasn’t effectively used to inform solutions or decision-making.
Leadership didn’t see clear results.

Although challenges and setbacks arose during the planning and implementation of the initial process improvements, I gained valuable insights into both the product and the team. These lessons learned helped me refine the approach and make the next iteration of the process truly effective.

Iteration 2: Long-term Process Enhancement Strategy

Alongside working on processes, I was building and growing the internal team of Designers and UX Researchers and organizing current design tasks. All this happened amid high product development intensity, which gave me the chance to get closer to the products, the team, the workflow, stakeholders’ specifics, and customers, forming a more holistic picture of the process and improvement opportunities.

Together with leadership, we reviewed Design process improvements and developed a more comprehensive, long-term process enhancement strategy.

Task Level

The most critical factor for effective task completion is active collaboration across the entire team. To support this, the external design team was granted full access to Jira and Confluence products documentation and actively participated in research activities, including conducting usability testing with customers, to gain a deeper understanding of the product and user needs.

During the discovery phase of key flows and customer problems, the internal design team, managers, and developers collaborated closely to design an effective solution together. To keep it smooth all communication related to task creation and artifact exchange was moved to Jira and structured using templates. Although this transition was initially challenging and sometimes required manual effort on my part, the team adapted within two months. This change significantly improved issue tracking and the management of improvements, while also providing valuable historical data for more accurate task estimation and planning.

Product Level

We revised the design artifact structure and created one Figma Dev file per product, storing a single version of each unique screen. Added flowcharts to help even newcomers navigate the complex architecture of the products.

Thanks to a transparent design process and effective research, the product managers were able to engage more actively with clients. With more time for planning and creative work, the UX research team conducted regular evaluations of design effectiveness using CSI, NPS, and SUM metrics.

The renewed design process helped designers, researchers, managers, and developers strengthen cross-functional relationships, enhance communication, and create more meaningful, user-centered solutions at the product level.

Strategic Level

By addressing process issues at the operational level, we gained better visibility at the strategic level. This led to the decision to overhaul our Product Design System to optimize the effort of both design and development teams (more on this in a separate story).

The company’s overall UX maturity increased, driven by systematic client feedback, deeper customer involvement, and the consistent application of research insights throughout the development process.

As a result, design costs for operational tasks were reduced, freeing up resources for large-scale research into new markets, onboarding new teams and formats, and advancing to the next level of innovation.

First Results at a Glance

Increased app rating to 4.8 (iOS) and 4.9 (Android)
Reduced design-related operational costs
Laid groundwork for a scalable Design System

This experience was more than a challenge, it was a journey of growth. My team and I led the creation of a new design process, restructured key artifacts, and fostered a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.