Brad Tober

Facing an increasingly complex multi-product ecosystem and the disruptive potential of AI, I recognized that Epsilon's product design organization needed to evolve beyond tactical execution to become a strategic driver of product vision and cross-portfolio integration. In response, I led the establishment of a dedicated Product Design Strategy & Research capability that would position design as a strategic partner in business decision-making.

My approach centered on creating a new organizational function that bridges user research, strategic design, and narrative development—moving our team "up the value chain" to focus on problems that require human insight and cross-functional orchestration. The initiative resulted in a structured methodology for strategic engagement, elevated design influence in product roadmap decisions, and a future-ready framework for leveraging AI to augment human capabilities and create new possibilities for strategic impact.

Business challenge

Epsilon's Product Design team faced multiple converging challenges that threatened our long-term relevance and impact:

• As our product portfolio grew more interconnected and our design team scaled, we lacked the strategic oversight needed to track threads across products and teams. Design decisions were being made in silos, leading to inefficient parallel work and missed opportunities for integration.
• The rapid emergence of AI tools posed an existential question for design teams. With AI increasingly capable of handling layout, interaction design, and even mockup creation, our traditional value proposition was at risk. We needed to identify and establish our irreplaceable human role in an AI-augmented future.
• Despite design's proven value in execution, we weren't sufficiently involved in early-stage product vision and decision-making. Product managers and executives were making foundational choices about direction and scope without adequate design input, leading to downstream challenges and missed opportunities for strategic influence.
• Our modest UX research team lacked a systematic way to translate user insights into organizational narratives and cross-functional alignment. Valuable user research was remaining siloed rather than driving broader organizational learning and strategic direction.

Strategic approach

I developed a multi-layered approach to building this new capability, grounded in strategic design principles and informed by industry research on the evolving role of design leadership.

The foundation was built upon three core competencies for our new function, based on (now defunct) Helsinki Design Lab's conceptualization of strategic design: integration (seeing the holistic picture across product boundaries), visualization (communicating the nature of complex and dynamic relationships between people / objects / entities), and stewardship (maintaining the integrity of design strategy throughout implementation). Helsinki Design Lab described itself as "[assisting] decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem," an identity our prospective team strongly related to. This framework provided clear differentiation from both tactical design and traditional product management roles.

I embraced a four-phase engagement model—discover, explore, test, and listen—with specific methods, artifacts, and success criteria for each phase. This included developing new deliverables like role-based personas, swim-lane task flows, and low-fidelity strategic wireframes designed to facilitate early-stage alignment without creating confusion about design completion status.

Based on Harvard Business Review research distinguishing high-performing from low-performing teams, I embedded practices to ensure teams focus on information gathering and problem understanding before jumping to solutions. This included structured workshop formats, evidence-based decision-making protocols, and visualization tools for organizing complex relationships.

Rather than viewing AI as a threat, I positioned it as a capability enhancer that augments human strategic thinking. The new team would explore how AI could expand our capacity for research synthesis, design system intelligence, and concept exploration—creating new possibilities for strategic insight that combine AI processing with human judgment and contextual understanding.

Team and collaboration

Gaining executive alignment required developing compelling business cases that demonstrated how strategic design capability would address real organizational pain points, from improving cross-product coordination to better leveraging our research investments. I positioned this not as an expansion of design scope, but as a necessary evolution to remain competitive in our market.

The initial team consisted of three existing Product Design team members, followed by our first dedicated hire with an integrated Strategy & Research focus. Together, this four-person team brought together complementary expertise across various conceptualizations of design, business strategy, as well as both academic and UX research. This diverse skill set ensured we could address strategic challenges from multiple perspectives while maintaining both visionary thinking and rigorous methodological foundation.

Rather than competing with Product Management functions, I framed Strategy & Research as complementary, bringing user-centered perspective and visual communication skills to early-stage work that PMs traditionally lead. I emphasized our role as "bridge builders" connecting insights across teams and products, which resonated with leadership seeking better coordination mechanisms.

To ensure adoption, I facilitated the team's creation of comprehensive documentation including a playbook, method guides, artifact templates, and a research repository that made our new capability accessible and actionable for stakeholders. This included clear guidance on when and how to engage Strategy & Research, significantly reducing friction for teams wanting to collaborate with us.

Outcome and impact

The Strategy & Research capability delivered measurable value across multiple dimensions. We successfully established design as a strategic partner in product visioning, with our team now engaged months before traditional design work begins. This early involvement has prevented downstream design challenges and improved coherence across our multi-product portfolio.

Our structured approach to understanding users became the standard method for new product exploration across teams, transforming user research from isolated studies into strategic narratives that drive organizational alignment. The solution fixation prevention framework we implemented has been adopted beyond design, improving decision-making quality in cross-functional product teams throughout the organization.

Workshop facilitation and visualization techniques have enhanced strategic planning processes across multiple business units, while our systematic documentation created comprehensive methodological resources that serve as both operational guide and organizational knowledge asset. This ensures the capability can scale and evolve beyond individual contributors.

Most importantly, we positioned the design organization to thrive in an AI-augmented environment by establishing enhanced human capabilities in strategic thinking, user empathy, and cross-functional orchestration. This created new possibilities for design impact rather than simply preserving existing roles, strengthening our organizational relevance and influence in an era of technological transformation.

Reflection

This initiative reinforced several key insights about design leadership in complex organizations:

• Strategic positioning is essential: Design leaders must proactively define and communicate their strategic value proposition. Waiting for invitation to strategic conversations limits impact—we must demonstrate why design thinking is essential for business success and position ourselves accordingly.
• Documentation drives adoption: Creating systematic methodologies and clear engagement models dramatically improves stakeholder adoption. Strategic design capabilities are often seen as abstract or inaccessible; concrete frameworks and deliverable examples make them actionable for non-designers.
• Change anticipation over reaction: The most impactful leadership comes from anticipating market shifts and positioning for new possibilities rather than defending against them. By proactively exploring how AI could augment design capabilities, we transformed potential disruption into expanded strategic influence.
• Integration over expansion: Rather than fighting for territory, focusing on integration and collaboration creates sustainable organizational value. The most successful design leaders are bridge-builders who enhance rather than compete with other functions.

This experience reinforced that design leadership increasingly means stewarding the evolution of our discipline itself. Leading this capability development was essentially a meta-design challenge—designing how we design. Rather than defending traditional boundaries, the opportunity lies in thoughtfully expanding what design can contribute to organizational success. Our most important work often happens at the disciplinary level, where we can shape not just what gets designed, but how design thinking becomes integral to organizational decision-making.