Helping teams improve design practices and cross-team collaboration in a complex design ecosystem.
Type
Consulting
Role
Senior Product Designer
Team
Product Designer(2)
Project Manager(1)
Skills
Design System
Overview
Supporting creative teams through a period of transition
I worked with Arc’teryx for several months as a design consultant, alongside another designer and a project manager. We were brought in to support multiple creative teams during a period of transition, helping them adapt to new tools and align more closely across disciplines.
Arc’teryx is a large, global organization with creative teams spanning many domains—from digital experiences and e-commerce, to editorial storytelling, marketing campaigns, and product design. While these teams operated independently, their work was often interconnected, requiring frequent collaboration and shared ownership.
The Situation
A transition that exposed deeper misalignment
At the time, several teams were navigating a shift in their design tooling. Some groups had already adopted modern, collaborative workflows, while others relied on tools that were approaching end of support and would soon need to be replaced.
This transition surfaced broader challenges. Teams worked in parallel but depended on one another to move projects forward. While one team had established systems and practices in place, those systems were optimized for their own workflows and were difficult for others to adopt without guidance.
What initially appeared to be a tooling migration quickly revealed a larger opportunity: aligning how creative teams worked together.
The Challenge
Helping teams meet in the middle
Our role was not simply to introduce a new tool, but to help teams adopt shared ways of working. This meant supporting teams who were new to the tool, while also working with more established teams to make their systems more accessible and inclusive.
We spent time with designers and stakeholders across teams to understand how they worked, where friction existed, and what was slowing collaboration down. Much of this phase involved listening—through conversations, interviews, and working sessions—to identify patterns rather than isolated issues.
Given the scope of the organization and the limited engagement window, we needed to be deliberate about where to focus.
Execution
Short-term priorities: creating shared foundations
The most immediate opportunities were small but high-impact.
One key focus was establishing consistent naming and organizational standards that could work across teams. Each group had developed its own conventions over time, which made shared files and assets difficult to navigate. Aligning on common standards helped reduce confusion and made work easier to discover and reuse.
Equally important was communicating and documenting these standards, ensuring they were easy to understand and accessible to everyone.
We also recommended creating a shared asset space that all teams could access. Instead of relying on individual team libraries or ad-hoc requests, a shared space for commonly used assets, templates, and references helped reduce dependency and delays.
Mid-term priorities: enabling adoption
With shared foundations in place, the next step was helping teams learn how to use them effectively. This included onboarding guidance, clarity around access and ownership, and lightweight processes for requesting updates or improvements.
To support this, we ran group sessions to introduce the tool and its workflows, followed by open office hours and one-on-one support. This allowed designers to ask questions in context and build confidence at their own pace.
Long-term priorities: completing the transition
Finally, once teams were comfortable working in the new environment and shared systems were established, the long-term goal was to fully retire legacy tooling. This ensured everyone was working within the same ecosystem and reduced fragmentation over time.
Outcome
A clearer path toward collaboration
We concluded the engagement by delivering a practical roadmap that outlined priorities, responsibilities, and next steps. Rather than prescribing a rigid solution, the plan provided a framework teams could adapt as they continued evolving.
The result was a shared direction for collaboration—one that balanced existing strengths with the needs of teams at different stages of adoption.
Reflection
Design Starts with Listening
Designing shared systems means balancing the needs of experts and newcomers. Practices that worked well for one team often created friction for others, and making systems more approachable sometimes required stepping back from over-optimization. These insights emerged primarily through listening—across conversations, interviews, and working sessions.