Elevance · Senior UX Designer → Director of UX
Standing up UX in a 70-year-old insurance giant
Elevance is one of the largest managed-healthcare companies in the U.S. Design was mostly reactive — scoped requests handed to UX for execution. I joined to build UX into a strategic function, grew the team from three to nine, introduced DesignOps and dual-agile, and worked with product to add discovery to the roadmap.
Fig. 01 / Virtual care
§ 01
Project overview.
Overview
Elevance had launched an innovation division to explore virtual healthcare that was convenient and cost-effective. I joined after it stood up — hired as a senior UX designer to deliver that vision through mobile and web, and promoted to lead the team soon after.
Goal
The group started with virtual care for rural members. COVID accelerated demand for remote healthcare industry-wide. Elevance wanted to reduce patient cost and expand access without lowering quality — the product context for our work.
Responsibilities
I led UX for the remote innovation team: five products, three scrum teams. Starting from three, I grew the function to nine, stood up DesignOps, and introduced dual-agile so design could run a sprint ahead of development. I hired and led the team and owned process decisions.
§ 02
Understanding & defining the problem.
When I joined as a senior UX designer, the UX team had two people — a junior researcher and a senior architect. I was there to help deliver the innovation division’s virtual-care vision, and was promoted to lead soon after. We were covering five consumer-facing initiatives and three scrum teams, with UX treated as execution on already-scoped work. A typical week:
- Partnering with product managers on requirements
- Running discovery on top of production deadlines
- Designing and testing product concepts
- Working with information architects and developers on feasibility
- Supporting releases for live applications
§ 03
The process.
The work happened in sequence: culture, headcount, cadence, then operating discipline. Each step depended on the one before it — and each required buy-in from product and engineering before the next could hold.
- 01
Culture
Embedding Design Thinking. From scoped handoffs to discovery with product partners.
- 02
Headcount
Building the team. Staffing, leveling, and capacity planning.
- 03
Cadence
Introducing Agile. Sprints, reviews, and handoffs the team could maintain.
- 04
Operating discipline
Introducing DesignOps. Documentation, tools, and ceremony standards.
01
Embedding Design Thinking
Getting product and operations leaders involved in research took longer than training the design team — most came from insurance and operations, not product discovery. I tried bottom-up first. It gained traction when a senior product partner began requesting research on his own initiatives: we needed a product sponsor, not just a trained design team.
Executives responded faster to design sprints — a fast, high-intensity way to validate concepts with few layers between leadership and the work. In parallel, the team committed to the core Design Thinking stages:
Empathize → Define → Explore → Prototype → Test → Repeat
Before this, designers were often asked only to build frontend mockups for already-scoped, unvalidated products. Moving discovery earlier gave UX a role in product decisions before mockups were due.
Maya was the clearest example. Elevance partnered with Lurie Children’s Hospital to explore remote post-operative care for pediatric patients — discharge sooner, recover at home, reduce extended-stay cost while giving parents and clinicians a way to monitor recovery. Instead of top-down direction, we started with a design sprint: senior executives and Lurie’s clinical leads in the room with us. We left with a direction and buy-in, then wrote a research plan, ran clinician interviews, and built the product from what we learned.
Supporting artifacts
02
Managing & leading the team
We were three people covering five products across three scrum teams. We couldn’t embed a designer on every team and the org wasn’t asking for one — UX was expected to deliver screens without slowing delivery. I kept designers on a central team that flexed across scrum teams, and put these habits in place:
- Brought in two vetted design agencies for temporary capacity
- Ran bi-weekly 1:1s to stay close to each person’s goals and blockers
- Set strict prioritization: any new request had to outrank existing work
- Improved work-in-progress tracking and recruited senior hires first
Within three months the team was six full-time internal members, two full-time contractors, and two part-time contractors. Each worked across one or more scrum teams, so knowledge spread and we covered more surface area than two embedded soloists could — without announcing a major reorg.
03
Introducing Agile
Designers had been pulled into sprints for a production task, then released. Dual-track agile would keep design running a sprint ahead of development. Product owners used to the old model saw that as overhead — we had to get five of them comfortable before the framework could hold. Working with a senior UX architect and an Agile coach, we stood up a semi-traditional Scrum setup: two-week sprints, standups, planning, grooming, reviews, retros. With product owners we:
- Ran design one sprint ahead of development
- Scoped design and dev work against shared, user-centered stories
Running dual-agile, we tracked WIP more consistently, set clearer expectations, and handed dev finalized designs before each sprint started. Some teammates were skeptical at first — they supported it once the cadence held for a few sprints.
04
Introducing DesignOps
Agile worked, but I was personally maintaining it — ceremonies, WIP, stakeholder questions — which wasn’t sustainable at director level. Rather than wait six months for an external hire, I converted Scott, the senior architect who’d helped stand up agile, into our first design producer. He operated like a scrum master for design, consolidating day-to-day ops so the rest of the team could focus on the work. The cadence in practice:
- Daily · 15 minStandupsBlockers and progress against sprint commitments; Scott triages and routes blockers before they cascade.
- Sprint open · 2-wkSprint planningDesign + dev align, scoped against user-centered stories; design runs one cycle ahead.
- Mid-sprintBacklog groomingUX + PM review the discovery pipeline; unvalidated stories are flagged before entering design.
- Sprint closeReview & hand-offDesign demos completed work and hands engineering the next sprint’s package, finalized, not in flight.
- Sprint close · teamRetrospectiveWhat worked, what didn’t, one process change to test; Scott owned the action items.
- Bi-weekly1:1sEach team member with me: career goals, capacity, blockers we couldn’t surface in a group.
“When I took over, UX was focused on one product. When I left, we were supporting four in parallel — with more requests and ongoing scope creep, still without a dedicated designer on every scrum team.”
§ 04
Reflections.
A few things I would handle differently if I did this again.
Lesson 01
We didn’t set up outcome measurement early enough. Dashboards were planned for later and partly owned by a partner team. The team did solid work, but I left without data to show impact. Next time I’d define a small set of metrics from the start — even research coverage or design cycle time.
Lesson 02
A large share of director-level work was stakeholder education. I spent more time than expected explaining UX to product owners, engineering leads, and executives who hadn’t worked closely with design. Alignment took as much time as the design work itself.
Lesson 03
Design Thinking spread faster with a product sponsor than with design-led training alone. Research became routine once a senior product partner began requesting it; design sprints worked especially well with executives. I’d match the method to the audience earlier next time.