Andy WilsonWhen I joined Whitespace, a B2B SaaS company in the London insurance market, design sat under analysis, its work didn’t match the product, and engineering had little respect for it. Over four years as Head of Design I grew the team from 3 people to 8 across the UK and Spain, with five direct hires and three promotions. Nobody has left. Along the way we built a design system, a career path, and a close working relationship with engineering.
Where design started
The business wanted better UX, but it didn’t yet know what that meant or what design needed to deliver it.
Engineering had little respect for design, mostly because designs often didn’t match what the application could actually do. The work was inaccurate, with little understanding of how decisions affected developers or users. Design also sat within analysis, led by someone from an analysis background, so it worked as an extension of that team instead of a function in its own right.
And speed usually won over quality. Decisions were hard to make, design was routinely compromised to hit dates, and we shipped solutions we knew weren’t right. That one took the longest to shift, and in some ways it still exists. It’s common in fast-moving businesses, and learning to work with it became a big part of the job.
First moves
I started with the team. The designers’ main frustrations were poor requirements and no feedback from developers. I listened, showed them I was there to support them, gave them a clear direction and set a shared standard for what good enough looked like.
Then I met the head of every delivery team and asked what wasn’t working for them. Out of those conversations I put together a streamlined solution delivery process, and asked every department to follow it and hold each other to it. It fixed problems for other teams as well as ours, and it gave me my first allies.
From there the work did most of the persuading. As we started delivering above expectations, people began to see there was more to design than they’d assumed.
Growing the team
Over the next few years the business doubled in size. The Verisk acquisition brought investment, we won several large brokers, and the business set an ambition to grow revenue tenfold. Demand rose across every team. By then the argument was no longer whether we needed design, but whether we needed more designers, and more experienced ones.
My first response was to make the team we had go further. I started our first design system to standardise how we worked, so we could deliver faster and more accurately. When that still couldn’t keep up with demand, I wrote job specs, benchmarked salaries and made the case for hiring budget.
We already had two mid-weight designers, so each hire filled a specific gap:
| Hire | Why |
|---|---|
| Lead designer | Strategic support, reviewing and raising the quality of the team’s work, and running projects with little guidance from me |
| Junior designer | Fresh perspective at the right time, and a better balance in the team |
| Two mid-level designers, Malaga | More capacity as work grew. We built alongside Verisk’s existing engineering hub in Malaga, and both brought deep product design and design system experience |
| Second lead designer, UK | Insurance and finance experience to handle growing complexity |
I hired for attitude first, then a design eye, then what made each person distinctive. We didn’t use design tests. The team became multicultural without setting out to be, and people from different backgrounds have brought different ways of solving problems.
How the team works now
Some designers are embedded in the product teams, guided and mentored by one of our leads. Others manage the design system and drive its adoption, working directly with engineering and QA. Day to day we have regular team catch-ups, all work runs through Jira, and everyone has a career path with goals we review together.
I set the strategy and keep teaching the team how to make the case for what they need. I still run deep design critiques, but I’m stepping back more and more to final sign-off, so the team can own its work and run without me.
I hold 1:1s every two weeks or monthly, depending on what each person wants. They’re where I learn how someone is really doing, how they see a situation, what drives them and what they want next, and when they need encouragement or a push to try something new. Most of the team’s growth started there. One of the two designers I inherited went from a very junior role to senior designer, with two promotions. The first junior I hired is now a mid-weight designer.
Engineering
When I joined, engineering didn’t think it needed design. Now we ask for engineering’s input on every piece of work, pitch solution approaches together, and engineers feel heard. The design system did a lot of that work, because it gave both teams the same terms and showed how similar our ways of working are.
The disconnect still appears at times, especially as engineering has grown. But design is now part of how the business builds, not something added at the end.
Looking back, all of this could have happened much faster. Insurance is sceptical of design, and I should have backed every proposal with far more data from the start. I spent too long trying to win allies to vouch for me when being more direct would have moved things along. And I should have pushed harder on technical debt earlier, even while the business was smaller and still maturing.