What does a high-functioning UX team actually look like day to day?

Overview

• Built and led a UX team offering end-to-end research, design, and strategy services

• Designed a repeatable team rhythm that balanced execution with exploration

• Served as the connective tissue between UX, leadership, and the broader organization

How We Were Structured

When I built this team, I wasn’t just hiring for skills — I was designing a function. Every role had a clear lane, and every person had a counterpart they could hand work to without losing momentum. I operated as the “point person” model: one owner per workstream, so nothing fell into the gap between Research and Design, or between Design and Engineering.

We ran on a Shape Up-influenced PM system, which gave us the structure to take on 2-3 projects per cycle (WCs 3-8) without overextending. Work was scoped into manageable chunks, and we built in cooldown periods — Weeks 1-2 of each cycle — to reflect, reset, and explore ideas before the next push.

Our team was comprised on 4 people, including myself:

• 2 Product Designers

• 1 User Researcher

• 1 Researcher/Leader

Working Rhythm

The team ran on a weekly check in meeting and a design review that kept work visible and feedback consistent. Check in meeting was the opportunity for the point person for each project to discuss progress, ask for help or collaboration, and support each other through awareness of the tasks for the week. Design review wasn’t a status meeting — it was a working session where we pressure-tested ideas, caught misalignment early, and made sure design decisions were grounded in what we knew about users.

Planning: Weeks 1-2

Planning weeks were intentional. The first one or two weeks of each cycle were dedicated to intake and leadership alignment — making sure we understood priorities before we started executing, not after. During this time, the rest of the team focused on important work that often fell to the wayside, such as:

• Updating the design system

• Exploring a new design idea

• Researching a topic

• Testing a tool

• Maintaining the research recruitment pool

• Checking in with colleagues

• QA evaluation

Work Sprint: Weeks 3-8

Planning ensured that we had achievable goals for the next phase: the work sprint. We set up this system because it aligned with goals shared by the Product Engineering and UX Teams: providing adequate time for 2-3 major projects, allowing individual contributors the flexibility to manage their time as they see fit, and allowing the adequate space for big ideas to be explored and executed. Delivery deadlines were mid and end of work cycle, always with communication with product managers and other stakeholders to update on progress and clarify expectations throughout the process.

This structure translated into a researcher running two major exploratory projects per cycle and supporting the designer’s usability testing projects. For designers, they executed on two features, but the design process included running their own usability testing. The designers on my team were building their research skills, so they often relied on the researchers to help them refine, sharpen, and analyze their research. Designers running usability testing had an unexpected benefit - designers knew their data so well, they often immediately had ideas for improvement and iteration, resulting in faster high fidelity design turnaround.

I strongly believe that creativity needs time, so giving space for flexibility is important for high quality design and research work. Often when stuck on a problem, putting the problem aside and allowing it to marinate is the fastest way to arrive at the right solution, as well as giving the team the chance to collaborate, brainstorm, and workshop solutions. This approach worked very well for our team, who had a 95% success rate at delivering designs and research results by agreed upon deadlines.

What We Offered

The team provided a full suite of UX services, which I scoped and staffed based on project needs:

• Customer & Client Empathy Workshops — bringing stakeholders closer to user perspectives

• Prototyping — site maps, user flows, and translating research into testable concepts

• Product Planning — high fidelity mock ups of the next phases of a product

• Design Research — grounding product decisions in user behavior, usually as unmoderated usability testing

• Exploratory Research — getting ahead of the roadmap to understand emerging needs

• Metric Development — defining how we’d know if something was working

• Market Research — supporting the operations & business development teams in understanding markets, pricing, and client needs

This range meant we could support a project at any stage, from early discovery through post-launch evaluation.

Staying Connected to the Organization

UX doesn’t work if it operates in a silo. I built communication structures that extended beyond our immediate team — regular touchpoints with stakeholders, clear documentation of decisions and findings, and an AI tooling practice we tested and iterated on together to stay efficient and current. The “point person” model helped here too. Stakeholders always knew who to go to, and our team always knew who owned the relationship.