Onboarding onto the Onboarding Team
In September 2025, I joined Santander as a Lead UX Designer within the Onboarding Team, a multidisciplinary squad responsible for all customer onboarding journeys — from current accounts and credit cards to digital channels like the website and mobile app.
Understanding the Challenge
Before officially joining, my manager and I conducted a short discovery phase to understand the state of the team. We uncovered several key challenges:
Lack of visibility: No centralised system existed to track in-flight tasks or priorities.
Stakeholder ambiguity: The team lacked clarity on who owned what, making collaboration inefficient.
Low cross-team collaboration: Designers worked in silos without visibility of each other’s work.
No structured triage process: New requests were handled ad-hoc, leading to reactive rather than strategic design.
Taking Initiative and Establishing Structure
Having experienced similar issues in my previous role on the Mobile App team, I recognised that visibility and structure were critical to both collaboration and mental clarity, especially as someone who thrives on clear systems due to my ADHD.
1. Mapping Stakeholders
I initiated and facilitated a stakeholder mapping workshop to identify and categorise all key partners across product, engineering, compliance, and marketing. This gave the team, especially newer members, a clear understanding of who to contact and why. This lead to a drastic reduction in time lost in communication loops and stakeholder discovery.
2. Introducing Task Visibility and JIRA Adoption
I spearheaded the adoption of JIRA within the design team. I designed a workflow tailored to our needs, trained team members on best practices, and embedded JIRA reviews into our weekly design syncs.
This improved transparency of ongoing work, supported accountability, and enabled better prioritisation of design resources.
3. Improving the Quality of User Stories
A recurring pain point across Santander was the inconsistency in user story quality. Stories often lacked critical context or skipped discovery phases, resulting in premature pushes toward high-fidelity design.
To address this, I collaborated in a Ways of Working group to explore what we would want captured in a story before picking up a task. Whilst I contributed to what the structure of this would be, I also prototyped an AI-assisted form that guided requesters through the process of defining user problems, goals, and required information, helping shift design conversations from “make this screen” to “let’s understand the user need.”
This approach not only improved documentation but also reduced ad-hoc requests and empowered designers to engage in more strategic discovery work.
Impact
Within the first few months, the onboarding team experienced:
A shared understanding of ongoing work through the new JIRA structure.
Clearer lines of communication and ownership thanks to the stakeholder map.
Higher-quality design requests and reduced context switching.
A culture of proactive collaboration, where designers could contribute beyond execution.
Reflection
This experience reinforced the value of clarity, structure, and empowerment in creative teams. By introducing systems thinking and collaborative tools early, I helped transform a fragmented design process into a more cohesive, visible, and user-centred workflow.
For me, it was also a reminder that good UX leadership isn’t just about design output. It’s about designing the conditions that allow teams to do their best work.