Building UX as a
product discipline.

Building the conditions for good design

Since 2018, my work has increasingly been about the conditions around design: who is on the team, how people develop, when UX enters a decision and how research changes what gets built.

At Lansweeper

I grew and shaped UX into a more complete product discipline. Today, the practice brings together seven people: five UX designers and two UX researchers. Research, interaction design and visual design work with Product and Engineering from problem framing through validation.

The objective was not simply to add design capacity. It was to create the conditions for better product decisions: make user evidence usable, clarify ownership across the product trio, and move UX upstream from a request for screens to a partner in defining the problem.

The situation

UX demand was increasing across a growing product, while the team was often engaged when a solution had already begun to take shape. Designers spent too much time translating requests into mock-ups, researchers had limited room for strategic work, and product teams risked validating assumptions late.

This was a maturity problem, not an effort problem. Good individual work was happening, but the organisation needed a clearer model for how UX contributed to strategy, discovery, delivery and learning.

A Triple Diamond for the product SDLC

I proposed the Triple Diamond framework as an end-to-end model for product development, then co-defined it with Product leadership. It gave the organisation one view of how strategy becomes a validated problem, a viable solution, working software and measurable customer value.

The model extends the familiar Double Diamond because shipping is not the end of product design. A third diamond makes development and rollout validation explicit: teams still need to test whether the implementation is usable, whether customers adopt it and whether the outcome justifies further investment.

Product strategy sits upstream of the three diamonds. Research, design-system stewardship, feedback, telemetry and continuous improvement run across them. The framework is deliberately iterative: it aligns responsibility and quality gates without becoming a rigid RACI or a one-way process.

Turn alignment into explicit gates

The framework connects each stage to a shared artefact. A Definition of Problem makes customer evidence, target users and intended outcomes visible before solution investment. A Definition of Ready aligns UX, Product and Engineering before delivery. Definition of Done and rollout validation connect implementation quality to adoption and feedback.

Just as importantly, it locates UX Research and UX Design across the lifecycle. Research is accountable for evidence in problem discovery and contributes again after rollout. Design leads solution exploration and validation, supports implementation through UX quality review, and continues learning once the feature reaches customers.

Building capability and influence

Build complementary capabilities

The team model connected research, interaction design and visual design across discovery, definition, solution development and execution. It brought the right expertise to a problem at the right moment: research to understand behaviour and needs, designers to turn insight into useful interactions, and the whole team to validate before scaling a solution.

Rather than dividing people into disconnected specialisms, the model made overlaps explicit. Research informed design decisions. Designers carried user evidence into the detail of a flow. Shared methods and critique created a common standard of quality.

Give people a path to grow

Hiring is one part of the work. At Mention Me and at Lansweeper, I published a career framework for the disciplines I represented. At Lansweeper, mentoring researchers and designers through a progression framework became part of growing the team's capability while its tools and responsibilities changed.

The leadership challenge is to connect individual growth with the skills the product needs. Research, interaction design and technical understanding should strengthen each other, while people retain room to develop their own expertise.

Make the product trio operational

The Triple Diamond provides the organisational lifecycle; the product trio makes it usable in everyday work. UX, Product and Engineering collaborate before a solution is locked, with responsibilities changing as the work moves from evidence to feasibility, validation and implementation.

The point is not to apply a diagram mechanically. It is to make normally missing conversations unavoidable: Who is this for? What evidence supports the problem? Can we test the solution before committing? What will tell us the release worked?

Create room for strategic UX

Workload planning distinguished product-initiative support from practice-building work. Alongside embedded work, the team invested in a research repository, more actionable insight, recruitment improvements, a design system, information architecture and platform-level usability.

Without that distinction, a team can appear fully utilised while never building the systems, knowledge or capability that make the next year better than the last.

From Emergent to Structured

I used a UX maturity model as a discussion tool with Product and Engineering leadership. It moved the conversation beyond “we need more designers” towards practical questions: where UX was involved, what capacity was needed for discovery, how collaboration worked, and what investment could unlock.

When I started at Lansweeper, in June 2023, the organisation began at a maturity level under the Emergent stage (3): UX was functional but inconsistent and too close to delivery, an afterthought. By November 2025, our internal assessment placed the practice at a level above Structured, level 4 in the Nielsen Norman Group maturity model, up from less than Emergent, level 3. This described a more systematic practice whose effectiveness still varied across the organisation. The progress came from changing how teams worked: complementary capability, shared methods, strategic capacity and a clearer lifecycle role for UX.

The maturity progression is documented in the November 2025 UX discipline presentation. It is an internal assessment using the NN/g framework, rather than an external certification. The current team comprises five designers and two researchers.

Preparing the discipline for AI

As AI entered the workflow, the same foundations became more important, not less. The team explored AI-assisted prototyping for complex flows, while recognising that fast prototypes are only useful when grounded in user evidence and a coherent design system.

The future-facing work extended beyond interfaces. In an agentic product world, UX has to shape agent personas, autonomy levels, human supervision, trust, explainability and the places where governance becomes visible to people.

What changed

What I learned

Growing a UX team is not primarily a hiring exercise. It is a design problem: define the capabilities a product needs, the relationships that make them effective, and the operating model that lets them influence decisions before they become expensive.

The strongest signal of maturity is not a larger team. It is a product organisation that reaches for user evidence before it reaches for a solution.