Scott Guirlinger
Product Design & Organizational Leadership
Product Design & Organizational Leadership
Challenge
As our UX organization at Hexagon grew and the product portfolio expanded, the team was operating without a shared foundation. Designers across products were working in parallel but not in concert — duplicating effort, maintaining inconsistent component libraries, and spending time on coordination that should have been going toward design work.
The absence of design operations infrastructure was slowing delivery, creating quality inconsistencies, and making it harder to onboard new team members effectively. The organization needed systems — not more process for its own sake, but the kind of scaffolding that lets creative teams move faster and more confidently.
Approach
Auditing the current state
I began with an honest inventory: what tools were in use, what was duplicated, where designers were losing time, and what quality issues were reaching product without being caught. This grounded the transformation in real pain rather than theoretical best practices.
Establishing a shared platform for design
The organization was still operating primarily in Adobe XD, with fragmented libraries and inconsistent practices across teams. Recognizing the industry's shift toward collaborative design workflows, I led the transition to Figma and built alignment around a shared approach to design delivery.
The migration created an opportunity to standardize tooling, establish common workflows, and lay the foundation for a scalable design system. Rather than simply moving files from one platform to another, we used the transition to rethink how teams collaborated, shared knowledge, and maintained consistency across products.
Building a shared design system
I led the creation of a cross-product component library and shared design assets that established a common language across the portfolio. Beyond improving consistency, the system reduced duplicated effort, accelerated delivery, and gave teams a foundation they could build upon rather than recreate.
Enabling real-time collaboration between design and engineering
I structured the Figma environment and documentation practices so that engineers and developers had direct, self-serve access to design files, components, and specifications—enabling real-time collaboration instead of asynchronous handoffs.
Building for sustainability, not perfection
The infrastructure was designed to evolve. I established an ownership model — embedding accountability for different parts of the system within the team — so the design ops infrastructure wouldn't become a bottleneck or a single point of failure.
Challenge | Action | Outcome |
Fragmented design tooling | Led Adobe XD → Figma transition | Collaboration platform |
Inconsistent component libraries | Built cross-product design system | Greater consistency |
Inefficient onboarding | Documentation and standards | Faster ramp-up |
Design-engineering friction | Shared Figma environment, documentation, and collaboration practices | Real-time collaboration and reduced rework |
Centralized dependency risk | Distributed ownership model | Sustainable scalability |
Results
- Created a common design platform used across multiple product teams, enabling consistency and collaboration at portfolio scale.
- Reduced onboarding time by 60% for new designers through shared documentation and design standards
- Shifted design-engineering collaboration from handoff-based to collaborative, giving engineers self-service access to design assets and specifications and reducing costly implementation rework
- Improved cross-team consistency in visual quality and interaction patterns through use of shared asset libraries — measurable through Figma analytics
- Created a sustainable ownership model that kept the system alive as the team grew and the portfolio expanded
Design operations isn't about process for its own sake. It's about creating the systems, standards, and shared understanding that allow talented people to do their best work at scale.
Leadership Reflection
The biggest improvements didn't come from creating more process. They came from reducing the barriers between teams. When designers and engineers share the same tools, documentation, and source of truth, collaboration happens earlier, decisions become clearer, and less work is wasted correcting misunderstandings later.
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