Raising UX maturity at enterprise scale

When I joined, design capability varied team by team, and there was no shared way to talk about it. I ran a baseline assessment on the Nielsen Norman Group maturity framework, then made the governance, research, and ownership changes the assessment pointed to. The organisation moved up a full level, and, just as usefully, the framework gave executives and design a shared, industry-standard language for the conversation.

I started by measuring where the organisation actually was.

Global Relay builds compliance technology for regulated financial institutions. When I joined, the design team was capable but under-structured: no consistent process, no design system, research on request rather than by default, and no shared definition of what good looked like. Design was working hard and still arriving late to decisions.

I assessed the organisation against the Nielsen Norman Group's six-level UX maturity framework to establish an honest baseline. It showed the design organisation its own gaps in plain terms, and gave executives a shared, industry-standard language for the conversation. Instead of arguing that design needed more influence, we could show where the organisation sat on the scale, what the next level required, and what it would return.

Governance, research, and ownership.

For maturity to move I had to change the operating model. The focus was concentrated in three distinct areas.

The first thing that needed change was governance. I introduced design sign-off protocols and ownership models across product lines, so every design decision had a named owner and an explicit approval path. A Figma governance model, built on structured card templates, captures who created a design, who signs it off, the context, and which business requirements it addresses. Decisions stopped stalling on the question of who owned what.

We moved research from an ad hoc service to a practice woven into the development lifecycle, so product decisions could be traced to evidence.

The third area was infrastructure which helped to lock in the gains we made. A dedicated design system team, founded from zero, gave the organisation a unified system now adopted across all product lines. An accessibility group, led by a designer I upskilled into the role, embedded inclusive design in the process rather than auditing it afterwards. Career frameworks and a rebuilt hiring process kept the right people in the right seats as the team scaled.

Throughout, we reassessed against the same NN Group framework, so progress was measured against the same baseline.

One full level up.

The organisation moved up a full level on the six-level scale. The framework is built so that each level requires structural change. A full-level shift across a 70-person, three-site organisation meant the operating model itself had changed.

More important is what changed day to day. Design now sits inside the software development lifecycle. Roadmap conversations with Product and Engineering leadership start with design in the room. And the clearest sign of that standing is the daily working sessions with the founder and CEO, which grew as the organisation's maturity did.