Examples of Cross-Team Leadership

At Inxeption, our company held a multi-day summit to define our product’s focus. Coming out of the summit, we had the first two tabs of the spreadsheet below, but there was no concrete plan. When I hadn’t received updated goals, I took the initiative to compile a unified list of priorities and coordinated with a senior business leader to ensure alignment. Thanks to this clear direction, our design team completed most initiatives within two months, driven by the structured plan outlined in the last two tabs.

In fall 2023, I became the sole platform designer supporting 16 developers, four product managers, and six QA testers while my teammate was on maternity leave. I like to stay closely involved in my features, but with so many in flight, it became hard to track key milestones—whether engineering had started without a design handoff, whether features had been reviewed before going live, whether they were demoed to the broader team, or if any issues remained unresolved.

With the Product team stretched thin—and some PMs early in their careers—I saw an opportunity to bring order to the process. I created a comprehensive tracker to monitor every feature I was aware of over a five-month period. Reviewing the tracker regularly with PMs kept me informed of up to 20 features at a time and encouraged the team to adopt it as part of their own process. This system helped maintain design quality at scale and demonstrated how I lead by identifying gaps, creating structure, and modeling consistent follow-through.

I like to ensure that a design is implemented as specced, but it can be tough for QA to verify every expectation, especially for tricky calculations. Even though it is typically not a UX task, I utilize my analytical skills when needed to provide spreadsheet calculators that engineers and QA can refer to during implementation and testing. These examples illustrate my commitment to accuracy and supporting the larger org across team boundaries.

I created this calculator to determine whether a freight shipment with certain characteristics should be considered a less-than-truckload (LTL) shipment or a full truckload (FTL) shipment at checkout, which affects cost. The decision is based on the shipment's linear footage, which refers to how much of the length of a truck is taken up by a shipment. That calculation depends on the size of a single pallet of the product, how high pallets can be stacked, and whether they can be turned 90º to save space. Engineering and QA could plug in these parameters and verify whether LTL or FTL quotes were correctly returned by the code.

This calculator became a much-used resource for engineering and QA when implementing net and monthly payment terms, which could be applied independently for different products in the same quote (called "offers" here), with modifiers such as bulk discounts, offer-level discounts, shipping fee, and storage fee.