Global Relay

I joined Global Relay to lead a design team of 15 and have grown it into an organisation of almost 70 across London, Vancouver, and New York. This case study covers how design operates here: the hybrid team model, the governance that makes ownership clear, the design system and accessibility practice, four years of daily working sessions with the founder and CEO, and a measurement model that connects design activity to business value. What holds it together is consistency: the same standards, run the same way, across three sites and every product line.

A growing company with a design team that hadn't scaled with it.

Global Relay provides archiving, compliance surveillance, and secure communication tools to regulated financial institutions. The products are complex, the regulatory requirements are strict, and the users are professionals who depend on these tools daily.

When I joined, the design team was 15 people split across London and Vancouver. There was no consistent process, no design system to speak of, no career framework, and no clear connection between design work and business strategy. The team was capable but under-structured, working in silos with limited influence on product direction. Design wasn't in the conversations that decided what the products would become.

Structure the team, embed the process, then scale.

I started with the fundamentals. I introduced a hybrid team model: designers report into a centralised design function for career development, standards, and community, but are embedded in product teams for day-to-day work. This broke down the silos and gave designers real proximity to product decisions while keeping the design org cohesive.

I embedded user-centred design into the software development lifecycle so it became part of how the company builds products. I introduced a Figma governance model using structured card templates that capture who created a design, who signs it off, the context, and which business requirements it addresses. This brought clarity and accountability to design decisions across a multi-site organisation. Strategy lives in ProductBoard, delivery in Jira, and design work is traceable across both.

I created dual career paths: a people management track and a project leadership track. Designers can now grow into either direction without one being seen as more senior than the other. I rewrote every job description and rebuilt the hiring process to attract the right people at every level.

I established a dedicated design system team from zero, building a new design system from scratch that improved on what existed before. I created an accessibility group and upskilled a designer to lead it, and over time accessibility moved inside the design system governance itself. WCAG conformance is an acceptance criterion for every new component and pattern, an in-house Figma plugin runs automated accessibility checks on the work, external audits verify it periodically, and designers across London and Vancouver go through accessibility workshops.

Through all of this, I built a culture of shared ownership. Everyone can contribute, everyone is heard. The result is a team that people don't want to leave: 93% retention across the scale-up years, across all three offices.

It started with a strategic initiative driven by the founder.

Global Relay is founder-led, and the founder and CEO stays close to the products. When I joined he was exploring an addition to one of them, a focused piece of mobile functionality, and he brought me into it directly, outside my day-to-day as a director. I was happy to be part of the new exploration: getting the requirements, managing his expectations, helping the team iterate, and giving feedback on his thinking.

At the same time I was hiring across all the product lines. Some of those designers I trained specifically for the CEO-facing work, and it worked very well. The founder watched them, and the scope grew with his confidence in the team. This addition to the product led to rethinking the strategy of the company's key product line and kicked off a redesign from the ground up across the app. We were rebuilding the design system in parallel, so each fed the other: the redesign stress-tested the system, and the system kept the redesign consistent.

That was four years ago. The workshops still run most days, three hours at a minimum, sometimes the full day. In the room: the founder and CEO, the product director, an architect, the lead iOS engineer, and designers from my team. We work through strategy and design in the same session, and the business requirements come straight from the source. My role is to feed back on direction, carry decisions across the other product lines so the products stay consistent, and direct the team on the next iteration. Design sign-off sits with me, and the work doesn't move forward until design has said yes.

That room changed where design sits in the company. The design system carries the CEO's sponsorship. When people inside the business say design drives the product, this is what they mean. And the seat at the table belongs to the design organisation, not to me personally. It started with the founder bringing design into a strategic initiative he was driving, and it became part of how the company builds.

Putting AI into the team's hands, with structure.

Generative AI is reshaping how design teams work. Rather than letting adoption happen ad hoc, I built a structured programme to integrate it across the design organisation.

I authored a master strategy covering eleven areas of design practice where AI delivers measurable impact: rapid prototyping, ideation, design system migration, governance, critique, documentation, research synthesis, and cross-team communication among them. I designed a thirteen-licence pilot across the highest-leverage teams, with clear success criteria and feedback loops.

To make adoption sustainable, I built a skills architecture: a library of project-based skills tailored to recurring design workflows, so designers spend less time prompting and more time doing the work. For the executive-facing product line, I designed a Leadership Feedback Acceleration Model that compresses senior review cycles without compromising rigour.

Alongside the team programme, I direct the design of the company's AI capabilities in the products themselves: interaction patterns designed in partnership with AI engineering, kept consistent across Web, iOS, and Android.

The principle throughout: AI should expand what the team can do while keeping the craft that makes the work credible.

A design organisation of seventy people should be able to show what it returns.

I built a measurement model that connects design activity to business value across three layers. At the top are shared product outcomes, the results design and product deliver together and are measured on together. Underneath sit end-user efficiency metrics that design owns: how quickly and accurately people get their work done in the products. And at the base is design system governance: adoption, consistency, and WCAG audit scores, the layer that makes the other two possible.

The three sit in that order for a reason. Governance is what design controls directly, efficiency is what it can prove, and shared outcomes are what the business actually cares about. Measuring all three keeps the conversation honest in both directions: design doesn't take credit for results it only contributed to, and the business doesn't treat design as unmeasurable.

A design organisation that operates at scale.

The team has grown from 15 to 70 people across London, Vancouver, and New York. But the numbers are the least interesting part. What changed is how design operates. It sits inside the product development process, it has clear governance and a design system that scales, an accessibility practice, career paths that keep people, and a measurement model that connects the work to business value. The maturity programme behind that shift has its own case study.

Design also sits differently in the company than it did when I joined. It's in the room where product strategy gets made, and sign-off from design is part of how strategic work moves forward. I'm also co-inventor on a US patent application for a gesture-based system for searching electronic records, which came out of the innovation culture within the team.