Redesigning the Backstage: Enabling Strategic Impact through Better Collaboration
Problems
Inefficient Internal Workflows Hindered Collaboration & Reduced the Team’s Impact on Long-term Business Goals.
Team challenge: The Strategic Design Team, made up of 1 Director, 1 Manager and 8 Service Designers, experienced friction in project workflows. This limited the team’s ability to deliver strategic value.
Business challenge: As the team was responsible for shaping omni-channel business strategies, inefficient workflows reduced their ability to uncover problems, support long-term initiatives, and contribute meaningfully to business goals.
Initial Hypothesis: It was hypothesised that these challenges stemmed from a lack of shared processes and collaboration frameworks across the team.
Research
Blockers & Morale Issues Across the Project Journey Hindered the Team’s Impact.
To understand how project workflows functioned across roles, I observed 5 designer-stakeholder meetings and conducted 10 semi-structured 1:1 interviews with the team, manager and director. These activities helped uncover friction points and alignment gaps across intake, scoping, research and delivery.
Finding 1
Designers lacked clarity at project start
They struggled to identify the right stakeholders, define a clear problem, and clarify roles, delaying early momentum and scoping.
Finding 2
Designers encountered blockers throughout delivery
Even after kickoff, they faced delays in accessing people, systems, or decisions, slowing progress.
Finding 3
Work practice variation was not the source of inefficiency
Contrary to the initial hypothesis, designers adapted their processes to each project’s needs. A rigid, one-size-fits-all workflow would have constrained flexibility.
Finding 4
Designers felt reactive and undervalued
With over 75% of projects initiated top-down as quick wins, designers had little ownership or involvement in defining problems. This led to disengagement, reduced morale, and limited long-term impact.
Opportunities
Prioritised Opportunities to Improve Collaboration & Unlock Strategic Value.
Based on the insights, I facilitated a collaborative session with the team to review and prioritise areas of focus. Together, we identified 2 key opportunity areas to guide the next phase of ideation.
Opportunity 1: Clarify Processes & Value to Improve Collaboration
How might the Strategic Design Team clearly communicate their processes and value to stakeholders, so that collaborators understand what to expect and how to work effectively with the team?
Opportunity 2: Enable the Team to Uncover & Lead Strategic Work
How might the Strategic Design Team effectively uncover business problems and opportunities from other units, so that they can deliver their true value to the company?
Recommendations
Co-created 2 Frameworks to Improve Stakeholder Collaboration & Enable Designer-led Discovery.
Building on the 2 prioritised opportunities, I facilitated co-creation workshops to collaboratively explore, develop, and refine potential solutions with the team. These sessions helped build alignment and ownership.
Recommendation 1: Build a Project Alignment Toolkit to improve collaboration
To support smoother collaboration, clearer ownership, and better momentum, a toolkit was proposed to be used across key project stages. For the team, it improves collaboration by setting clearer expectations with stakeholders. For the business, it strengthens project alignment and delivery across teams, enabling more consistent omni-channel experiences.
Recommendation 2: Create a Team Opportunity Log to Support Proactive, Designer-led Discovery
To enable bottom-up idea generation, increase ownership, and build a sustainable project pipeline, an Opportunity Log was proposed to capture opportunities identified by designers, collaborators, and past projects. For the team, it empowers designers to shape their own work and contribute more strategically. For the business, it surfaces overlooked opportunities that strengthen omni-channel customer experiences.
Results
The Recommendations Laid the Foundation for Better Team Collaboration, Stronger Project Pipelines, & Improved Omni-channel Experiences.
The recommendations were projected to result in:
Short-term Outcomes
Faster project alignment and delivery
Clearer roles and expectations streamlined early-stage alignment.
Increased team morale and ownership
Designers felt more empowered and engaged through bottom-up input.
Long-term Impact
Stronger pipeline of strategic projects
Designer-led discovery surfaces high-value initiatives that might be missed through top-down planning alone.
More consistent omni-channel delivery
Clearer processes enabled smoother collaboration across teams, improving CX consistency.
Next Steps
Validate the Recommendations & Measure Impact
Pilot and gather feedback: Prototype and test the Alignment Toolkit and Opportunity Log with a small project team to gather feedback and iterate.
Embed and Track: Integrate the tools into team rituals and project workflows, while monitoring impact on alignment speed, project ownership, and team engagement.
Learnings
Adapting to Context, Designing Beyond the Feature
Adopting a systems thinking approach: What seemed like a workflow issue was part of a broader system of unclear ownership, uneven trust, and top-down project intake. This taught me to explore patterns, relationships, and root causes when designing for team effectiveness.
Designing for the backstage is designing for the business: This experience reminded me that behind-the-scenes workflows aren’t just operational, but they also shape how teams deliver impact to the business. In future projects, I’ll continue to map both frontstage and backstage experiences to uncover systemic barriers and co-create solutions that drive end-to-end impact.
Co-creating frameworks builds buy-in and momentum: Involving the team in prioritising challenges and shaping solutions led to stronger engagement and better alignment.
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