Scaling Human-Centered Design

Role: Director of Design Practices | Design Research & Operations

Duration: Initial assessment and impact delivered within ~3 months, with ongoing work extending across multiple quarters.

I led the Design Practice Service within Capital One’s Research and Design Operations organization, focusing on how human-centered design was being practiced across teams operating at different levels of collaboration, ownership, and execution maturity.

As teams scaled across the organization, experience quality and design practices had become increasingly inconsistent. The work focused on identifying patterns affecting collaboration, execution, and adoption in order to create a clearer understanding of where teams were succeeding and where friction existed.

Key Outcomes

  • Established a consistent scalable HCD assessment framework to evaluate how teams were practicing human-centered design across 22 critical business experiences

  • Shifted design quality conversations from perception to evidence through structured evaluation

  • Identified systemic gaps in collaboration, ownership, and execution across teams

  • Enabled more than 50% of participating teams to identify and prioritize operational and collaboration improvements

  • Achieved 82% satisfaction with the HCD review process

  • Created a foundation for improving design maturity and informing future investment

Challenge

Capital One had made a strong investment in human-centered design, supported across design, product, and engineering.

However, execution varied significantly across teams.

  • Teams interpreted HCD practices differently

  • Ownership across design and product was unclear

  • Collaboration models were inconsistent

  • Teams were often solving similar problems in different ways, creating uneven approaches to collaboration, delivery, and experience quality across the organization.

Even among top-priority business experiences, outcomes were uneven. The opportunity wasn’t to introduce design, but to make it work consistently at scale.

Approach

1. Understand How Teams Were Actually Operating

Partnered with executive design leaders to identify 22 key business experiences and conducted structured HCD assessments to understand how teams were actually operating.

This created a shared, evidence-based view of design performance across the organization.

2. Create a More Consistent Way to Evaluate Practices

Led the refinement of an HCD scorecard that:

  • Evaluated teams across each phase of the design process

  • Defined clearer criteria for assessing execution

  • Enabled more consistent evaluation across teams

  • Was designed to be reusable by teams over time

It provided a consistent way for teams to assess and strengthen their design practices over time.

3. Look Beyond Deliverables to Understand Team Dynamics

Through assessments and team interviews, we identified that performance differences were driven less by design capability and more by how teams operated.

Common patterns emerged:

Lower-performing teams

  • Hierarchical decision-making

  • Limited collaboration across functions

  • Focus on MVP delivery over experience quality

Higher-performing teams

  • Shared ownership across design, product, and engineering

  • Strong alignment and communication

  • Integrated decision-making throughout the process

This reframed the problem from a design issue to a systems and collaboration issue.

4. Create Shared Understanding With Leadership

To move beyond assessment, I worked directly with executive design leaders across lines of business.

  • Conducted individual sessions to align on findings and priorities

  • Connected HCD improvements to business and product outcomes

  • Introduced a roadmap for scaling practices across the organization

This included:

  • A Product Delivery Blueprint to clarify roles and responsibilities

  • Expanded HCD resources and training

  • A plan for ongoing assessment and continuous improvement

Results

Immediate Impact (within 3 months)

  • 82% of teams rated the HCD reviews as helpful

  • 76% found the insights valuable

  • Over 50% of participating teams implemented operational or collaboration improvements based on assessment findings

Organizational Impact

  • Established a more consistent understanding of how teams evaluated and applied human-centered design practices

  • Exposed recurring gaps in collaboration, ownership, and execution across teams

  • Highlighted and began addressing misalignment between design, product, and engineering

  • Created a more structured and repeatable approach for teams to evaluate and improve their practices over time

Strategic Impact

  • Introduced a repeatable approach for assessing human-centered design practices across teams

  • Shifted design toward more consistent and measurable evaluation criteria into how teams reviewed design practices

  • Increased visibility into how collaboration and operational practices were affecting experience quality across teams

  • Established a foundation for continued improvement in design maturity and team practices

Key Takeaways

  • Scaling design practices requires more than standards alone

  • Collaboration patterns often have a direct impact on execution quality

  • Sustained adoption depends heavily on leadership alignment and support

  • Simplicity and clarity drive adoption more effectively than process complexity

What I’d Do Differently

  • Engage leadership earlier and more consistently across design, product, and business teams

  • Begin with teams more open to change in order to demonstrate early momentum

  • Further simplify and adapt the HCD framework to better reflect how teams actually work

  • Invest earlier in structured training, enablement, and ongoing support

Because ultimately:

“Long-term progress depends less on defining the “right” process and more on creating alignment, encouraging adoption, and reinforcing sustainable behavior change”

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