Team Leadership · F&G · 2022–Present
Building the UX Practice
- Scales output
- Frees designers
F&G didn't have a UX practice. I founded one, grew the team from 1 to 5 people, and built the operating system underneath it so a growing team could take on more without reinventing how work gets done.
All projectsAt a glance
- UX team grown
- 1 to 5
- Compliance review cycles after moving to Jira
- 40% shorter
- People needed to ship a site update (editor + approver)
- 7 to 2
- To deploy a site update — was a week on average, 2 days at best
- Minutes
- Site build times after Netlify migration
- 60% faster
The challenge
There was no one at F&G whose job was the user experience itself, and no shared way of working to build a team on. Without a design-ops framework or documentation standards, every new project meant re-deciding how work got requested, reviewed, and shipped.
The approach
I founded the UX function and grew it from 1 to 5 people, and put the structure in place to support it: a design-operations framework and technical documentation standards, so new team members ramped onto a shared process instead of tribal knowledge.
I also invested in the systems the team runs on. Marketing's job-management workflow moved into Jira, compliance review followed it — cutting review cycles 40%. The move to Netlify changed how the site ships: a release used to pull in 7 people and take a week on average (2 days at best); now it takes an editor and an approver, and deploys in minutes, with builds 60% faster. And I cross-trained in both directions: designers on accessibility, engineers on UX principles. Training is a habit I brought from Two Rivers Marketing, where I led 100+ internal sessions on structured data, semantic markup, and accessibility.
Beyond the team
Standards developers and their AI agents follow
The practice reaches past the UX team. I serve as the front-end and UX expert in F&G's Developer Community of Practice.
I also wrote the front-end guides F&G's AI coding agents
follow: a design.md for
F&G's design standards and an accessibility.md for
accessibility requirements. It's the same idea as my self-service
tools. Instead of reviewing every generated interface after the
fact, the standards go where the agent reads them, so its output
starts out on-brand and accessible.
What it meant for the team
The team grew five-fold on a documented way of working, and leadership could finally see where work was going — and where more people or better tools were needed.
“The result is a scalable and easy to use job management system that helps our team be more productive with the dozens of jobs we manage every day. We can also finally run reports that help us identify what areas need more resources or better solutions.”
“Modernizing our ad review process by streamlining it with Jira and eliminating entering data in multiple systems is setting us up for success and scalability. This project has and will continue to save team members time entering data in multiple places…”
The results
- Founded F&G's UX function and grew it from 1 to 5 people.
- Established a design-operations framework and technical documentation standards.
- Compliance review cycles 40% shorter after moving to Jira; site builds 60% faster after the Netlify migration.
- Site deployments went from 7 people and about a week to 2 people and minutes on Netlify.
- Front-end and UX expert in F&G's Developer Community of Practice, and author of the
design.mdandaccessibility.mdguides F&G's AI coding agents follow. - Today I lead a cross-functional team spanning design, UX, and engineering.