Three moves, in a fixed order: the team, then engineering, then product. I build and test this playbook at Nextens, as a senior designer, before I have the lead title. It needs no title and no big team to start, so I can run it in any product organisation.
Nextens is a Dutch tax-software company inside RELX, and it is where I build and test this playbook. When I join in November 2022, seven people work on UX, side by side, with no shared way of working. Design gets the stories that are left over, research has no mandate, and engineering keeps its distance.
Each move in the playbook closes one of those gaps, and each comes with its own tools. Two years later UX plans the work with product and tech. The lead title arrives in October 2024 and confirms a role I already do.
Design at Nextens is an afterthought. In sprint planning the delivery manager and the product manager decide which stories get design time, and designers execute what lands on their desk. Nobody sets a direction. Every design bounces between the designer and the requirement engineers.
Seven people work on UX: two senior designers, a researcher, two contract designers and two interns. They sit side by side on the same product. The dependencies between their work stay invisible.
Three gaps stand out. Each one becomes a move in the playbook.
No rituals, no shared board, no view of who works on what.
Research runs without a mandate, so teams ignore or bypass the results. The user data sits in Adobe Analytics and Salesforce, and UX has access to neither.
Developers keep their own component library and doubt what designers understand. Most handovers turn into a debate about what is possible.
I start as a senior designer with no mandate and no team to lead. That shapes the playbook: every move has to work without authority. The lead title comes 23 months later, in October 2024. By then almost everything on this page already runs.
The moves go in a fixed order. Each one earns the trust that the next one needs.
Make the work visible and give the designers one shared rhythm.
Make engineering a partner in the work, from the first sketch to the build.
Give UX a seat in the meetings where product sets its priorities.
Three principles carry the playbook. Each one has a cost, named under it.
Three months in, the UX team holds its first offsite. Daily standups start eleven days later, every morning before the product teams hold theirs. The board and the first retro follow at the end of March 2023. I start with how we work together and ask product for nothing yet.
Trade-off: for the first months, product sees almost no change. The return lands inside the team first.
The board shows how the work is divided. It also shows that the legacy parts of Nextens carry no UX priority and need no dedicated designer. I take that picture to our manager, who decides to release both contractors. The second one leaves in February 2023.
In their place I build a pipeline, with a new intern every six months and five in total. One of the interns who joined with me becomes our medior designer, a hire I push for. Another I hire first as an intern, then as a junior, and he later moves into the UI Engineer role. Each new intern also finds a hole in our onboarding, so the documentation grows one gap at a time.
Trade-off: growing people is slower than hiring experience. Mentoring eats hours I could spend designing.
I set up pre-refinements where UX, product and tech (the three amigos) shape a story before it reaches a team. In December 2023 UX joins the yearly roadmap session for the first time. We bring user problems and the group dot-votes. Accessibility makes the roadmap that way.
Trade-off: designers now spend hours in planning that used to go to design work.
Six columns: To do, Analysis, Doing, Review, In test, Done. A card is one piece of product work, with its design tasks inside as a checklist. For the first time everyone sees who works on what and where two pieces of work collide. Ask me for the single change with the most effect and I point at this board, plus the rituals around it: standup, design review, retro and the offsite.
Before, the PM and DM pick what gets design, a designer executes, and the story bounces back and forth. Now UX, product and tech shape the story together before any team sees it. Together with component reuse from the design system, larger features drop from about 12 refinement rounds to about 4, and small features from 3 to 1, by team count.
We start with the design system, because it buys speed and earns trust from developers. It has its own case study. Later our junior designer moves into a UI Engineer role inside the UX team, and design-to-build drift drops to a single incident in a year.
Discovery with prototypes spreads one team at a time, as product managers see what it gives them. It helps that I have worked next to every PM at some point, so the trust is already there when the new way of working arrives. Today all 10 product teams work this way.
With our UX researcher I set up research operations: one tracker for every study, and results that go back to the teams. Since November 2024 we complete 70 studies, with 14 running and 16 planned.
UX gets Salesforce access in September 2023 and Adobe Analytics in April 2024. The first time we use the data to push back on a product manager, the topic is size. On the PM's laptop our UI elements look too big, and the PM wants them smaller before the release goes out. Screen resolution is the wrong measure for this. 99% of our users run Windows, and work laptops scale the display to 150% by default, so a high-resolution screen can still give a small browser window. We check the most common viewport instead, and it does not support the change. The release ships on time, with the elements as they are.
What the playbook delivers at Nextens.
After my lead period, everything keeps running except the 1:1s. I still mentor designers on the team.
The sequence travels. Nextens is where I find it, but nothing in it depends on tax software or on RELX. The team first, then engineering, then product. The first tools are cheap: a board, a daily standup and a seat in refinement. They need no title and no budget, so the playbook can start in week one of a new role.
Measure from day one. The research tracker starts two years after I join. Since then I can count every study. Before it I count nothing, so the refinement numbers rest on team memory. The next time I run the playbook, the baseline comes first.