Scaling design across an organization
Introduction
This case study examines how I scaled UX Design at CHG Healthcare, viewed through the lens of Nielsen Norman Group's UX Maturity Model. I'll detail our transformation from scattered, reactive efforts into a structured, scalable UX organization, sharing the key challenges and strategies along the way.
About the company
CHG Healthcare, founded in 1978, pioneered the locum tenens industry—providing temporary healthcare staffing. This two-sided marketplace connects Providers (doctors seeking flexibility or transitioning from traditional positions) with Clients (hospitals in need of temporary staff). CHG's success historically came from strong relationships between their sales representatives and providers. However, by the mid-2010s, outdated analog processes and manual workflows threatened their market leadership. As customer expectations evolved, CHG launched a digital transformation to enhance their relationship-based approach with user-centered digital capabilities.
From Lone UXer to Team Builder: Transitioning to Leadership
When I joined CHG Healthcare as their first UX Designer, I arrived at a pivotal moment in the company's digital transformation. Though hired to bring design work in-house from an external agency, I found myself primarily acting as a liaison between stakeholders and the agency—quite different from the collaborative, fast-paced startup environments I was used to.
Initially, I questioned whether leaving the Bay Area for CHG had been the right move. However, I noticed Digital Marketing leadership was already discussing user-centered design and preparing to launch new products. The opportunity became clear: I could help catalyze the scaling of user experience design across the company. With persistence, leadership embraced a vision of user-centered design at the grassroots level, and momentum built steadily as we brought this vision to life. I championed integrating UX early in the product lifecycle and helped decision-makers understand its value.
At this point, CHG was in Stage 1: Absent of Nielsen Norman Group's UX Maturity Model. UX efforts were purely reactive and fragmented, lacking formal processes or strategic influence. By embedding designers into product teams and ensuring consistent delivery against roadmaps, we progressed toward Stage 2: Limited, where isolated UX efforts began showing measurable value.
Over the next two years, I strategically grew the team from a single designer to a thriving organization of 20, including establishing a dedicated UX Research team. Our initial approach had a significant flaw: we outsourced discovery and creative work to an agencies, then built internal teams to maintain those experiences—a pattern that would later create consistency and scaling challenges.
Amplify the Insights: Establish a Research Function
As our UX team grew, it quickly became clear that embedding user research was essential for driving impactful, user-centered solutions. Our UX Designers initially juggled multiple responsibilities—conducting usability studies and creating research strategies while leading design and delivery. Though this approach sufficed in the early stages, we soon needed dedicated researchers to deepen our understanding of user needs and accelerate product development.
I advocated to leadership for a dedicated User Research function, emphasizing how specialized expertise would provide actionable insights and ensure we were solving the right problems. We started small, hiring our first UX Researcher whose immediate impact proved undeniable. Their research brought clarity to user goals and pain points, leading to more informed product decisions.
We expanded to four researchers, each supporting a specific audience: Providers, Clients, Sales/Internal Teams, and Credentialing. This focused structure helped uncover targeted insights for each area. To scale our research operations, I brought on a dedicated UX Research Manager who established foundational processes and built a research repository. This repository democratized access to insights across the organization, allowing teams to leverage existing knowledge before launching new research initiatives.
The cultural shift ran deep. Decision-making evolved from anecdotal evidence to user-driven data, both qualitative and quantitative. Product Managers, leadership, and stakeholders actively sought out research findings, consistently praising their value and impact. By amplifying the user's voice throughout the organization, this new function became foundational to our transformation. This marked our transition into Stage 3: Emergent of UX maturity, where isolated UX efforts were growing into a more formalized practice.
Bridging the Gap: Educating and Aligning Teams
As UX Designers joined product teams, we encountered a significant challenge: most cross-functional partners—especially those in Product Management and Engineering—had either never worked with UX professionals or viewed UX merely as a service to translate predefined solutions into user interfaces, rather than as a strategic partner in problem-solving.
I focused on empowering designers to advocate for user-centered practices and early involvement in the software development lifecycle. We evangelized UX participation during ideation, showing how understanding user goals and motivations could reduce rework while aligning with business objectives. Through close collaboration with Product Management leadership, we established discovery practices across teams, ensuring they could effectively define problems before jumping to solutions.
The real breakthrough came when I helped Product Management implement the Discovery Playbook. This structured guidance on user research, prototyping, and iterative testing demonstrated UX's true value to Product Managers. The results spoke for themselves: less rework, better decisions, and recognition of UX as a strategic partner. This wasn't just a cultural shift—it became our standard way of building products, with UX at the heart of innovation.
Lessons Learned: Our First Steps Toward a Design System
As our team grew, we recognized the need to create consistency and efficiency across our UX Design organization. Our first attempt at a design system focused on establishing common ground for components—drop-downs, buttons, and layouts—along with standardized typography, spacing, and usage guidelines. While this work fostered collaboration among previously siloed UX Designers and deepened their understanding of shared components, it revealed significant challenges.
Circling back to our scaling issue: our interfaces varied widely due to outsourced design work and technology acquisitions. We realized that a centralized design system couldn't succeed until we addressed these fundamental inconsistencies across our product interfaces. The process also stalled as we became mired in exhaustive detail. We spent too much time analyzing decisions and failed to effectively communicate the value of this behind-the-scenes work to leadership. Our engineering teams' different tech stacks compounded the challenge, making it difficult to demonstrate how the design system could increase frontend efficiency and velocity. Without visible progress, the work lost momentum and investment. The key lesson emerged: gaining organizational buy-in required delivering visible, incremental improvements—showing how a unified user experience could elevate our products and align with business objectives. This insight became the foundation for our second, more successful attempt at scalable design.
A Fresh Start: Building a Unified User Experience
Our failed attempt at a design system taught us valuable lessons about the challenges of standardizing components across different products. We realized that to effectively share components, all our products needed a similar experience, sharing fundamental structures, layouts, and foundational elements. We entered our second effort with a clearer strategy: evolve all products toward a Unified User Experience (UUX) while building an effective design system at its core. This approach would address leadership visibility challenges—after all, you won't get investment for operational efficiency in design and engineering without visible changes that demonstrate value to leadership and cross-functional partners.
We started with our most mature product as a blueprint for future redesigns. By aligning foundational structures—global navigation, layouts, and common components—we laid the groundwork for scalable design across our digital product suite. This time, we prioritized visible progress. Each updated product would not only implement the new design system but also demonstrate clear improvements in usability and efficiency, making the benefits of scaling UX self-evident.
As we continue our evolution, we are tying the design system to measurable outcomes—reduced time-to-market, improved developer efficiency, and enhanced user satisfaction—to showcase its strategic value. Our clear goal is to elevate all product experiences while building a design system that fosters UX Designer collaboration, accelerates frontend development, and delivers a cohesive user experience. Though ambitious, this work promises to be transformative.
We are currently refactoring our first product and have established a roadmap to refactor each product over the next few years. Based on several factors, we have confidently matured to Stage 4: Structured, where UX processes and practices become much more standardized and repeatable across the organization.
Looking Ahead: A Vision for UX Excellence
The journey to scale design at CHG Healthcare is far from over. While we've made significant strides in creating a consistent shared experience across our products through our scalable design system, I'm now focusing on the future of our design organization—specifically on increasing our innovation and adaptability.
Emerging technologies like AI and machine learning offer new ways to enhance our products and better serve user needs. Service design—thinking holistically about end-to-end user journeys across touchpoints—presents another exciting frontier. We are currently leading grassroots efforts to embed service design principles in our product teams and across the organization, expanding our impact from individual products to comprehensive customer experiences throughout the company.
Professional growth remains a top priority. By investing in UX Designer development, strengthening cross-functional partnerships, and refining our processes, we'll continue to lead the company toward user-centered design. Our vision extends beyond scaling design systems—we're building an organization that will thrive on innovation and deliver unparalleled value to both users and business.
Our aspirations align with reaching Stage 5: Integrated of the UX Maturity Model, where UX becomes a strategic pillar fully embedded across the organization, driving decisions and fostering cross-functional collaboration. Through continued investment in scalable design systems, user research, and innovation, we'll not only maintain momentum but also achieve a level of UX maturity where user-centered design becomes inseparable from our organizational strategy.
This story simplifies my journey from individual contributor to leader, showing how I helped scale design and user-centered principles across CHG Healthcare. Though I've omitted many details, setbacks, and pivots for brevity, the impact has been truly transformational—I built two thriving organizations and helped reshape our approach to product development, elevating the user's voice in our decision-making process. We fundamentally changed not just what we built but how we built it. That's something to be truly proud of.