Scaling a Digital Bank's Design Org  with Customer evidence as a release gate

Banco Next, the digital bank within the Bradesco group, was in the process expanding of its product and business teams. The strategic problem was twofold: differentiate in a financial market where most products and services had already become commodities, and pursue long-term institutional autonomy, moving beyond operating as a correspondent bank. My mandate was to help the company build the foundations to scale its processes, teams, and product-development toolkit, much as a technology company would, but within the constraints of finance: banking structures (agencies and transactional data), judicial matters and Brazilian Central Bank regulatory frameworks the bank had to honor. All of this shaped how I organized people, processes and tools.

““A design team is a living organism, it performs according to the means and resources it is given. Keeping it healthy takes continuous nurturing from everyone on it.””

The design chapter spanned six expertise tracks: 9 UX Researchers, 7 DesignOps (product/service designers, illustration, motion, interns), 8 Design Leads, 2 UX Writers, 6 Design Systems, and 25 Product Designers, totalling roughly 57 people. The team I formed and led directly, UX Researchers, Design Leads and DesignOps, operated across 12 business verticals (up to 18 distinct topics, from personal accounts and payments to lending, investments, insurance, onboarding and Open Finance).

Through negotiations with the CPO, Directors, Agile Chapter and the other UX Managers, the team's mandate consolidated into three attributes: strategic solutions and investigations on H2/H3 horizons and mid-term Product Discovery; support for designing and running research and experiments inside the sprints (delivery) and disseminating data-driven decisions through data, reports, and customer-behavior insights.

Beyond standard people-management routines, my role included four tracks: Career guidance, Product Discovery for Design Leaders; Coordinating vendors, license, legal, accessibility and cybersecurity with procurament & compliance areas; Research-fundamentals trainings for Product Designers and Operational management (DesignOps and UX Research). Across all of these tracks I set myself a mission: to create a culture of customer-centricity throughout the whole company.

“My main role will always be to foster a culture of customer-centricity across the company.”

After establishing the research and operations team's budget, positions, mandate and routines, I diagnosed several problems and prioritized the four largest. These were building mature, autonomous teams,; sustaining a continuous discovery cycle, raising operational efficiency and tying research to business strategy. Each became a workstream with concrete changes attached.

When large teams grow exponentially technical knowledge tends to be diluted and distributed  unevenly, as people leave and new groups learn to work together. I countered that with a program spanning upskilling, skills mapping and tighter integration of leadership into the tribes' day-to-day activities. Within this, I:

1. Revised the individual development plan (PDI) model for the entire UX team.
2. Built a competency matrix for Design Leads — to map the improvements each needed.
3. Rewrote job descriptions — to match what the team actually required.
4. Set cadences and enabled Leads — as facilitators of Digital Transformation inside the tribes.
5. Ran usability-testing workshops — so Product Designers could reach greater autonomy.

While teams still in their forming ('storming') stage learn how to build better products, there is a risk of  the learning cycle being broken. Therefore, my priority was to keep discovery continuous and accelerate customer participation in research so the team's learning never stalled. To this end, I:

1. Reworked the consent terms with legal, cutting them from 7 pages to 1.5.
2. Built a semi-automated recruitment program to engage the client base and generate qualified research leads.
3. Created an incentive system — for research and test participants.
4. Approved research and recruitment vendors — for immediate use.
5. Set up a delegation board for usability tests — so Product Designers and UX Researchers could work effectively.
6. Produced templates and playbooks — to make customer contact more consistent across product and business teams.

The cost of hiring and the unpredictability it introduced into delivery was one of the company´s most pressing concerns. My main approach here was to strip out as many impediments as possible so the team could resolve their day-to-day tasks efficiently.

1. Organized the resource set — access, licenses and tools for UX Researchers.
2. Acquired new tools —  to raise the team's efficiency (SurveyMonkey, Maze, Dovetail, OneSpam sign, etc).
3. Introduced a research-and-process Kanban to make work-in-progress visible to everyone. 
4. Built a research repository — allowing fast access by business and product teams.
5. Created a repository for sensitive terms and data — (cybersecurity + LGPD/GDPR).
6. Measured team lead time — to drove continuous improvement through Kaizen. 

Beyond deepening business knowledge for better research, the team had to make the impact of its work tangible (savings above all) to Heads, Product Managers and Owners. This would ensure that evidence-based decisions became a habit rather than an exception. My focus was to connect research to the company's macro strategy and make its value legible to leadership.

1. Updated the Ansoff Matrix with executives — so research aligned with the company's macro strategy.
2. Built a quarterly roadmap of strategic topics — with Heads and UX Researchers.
3. Created an experiment tree — for every research effort delivered in each vertical.
4. Developed CSAT for strategic features — for business teams to track.
5. Trained PMs and POs — on building hypotheses, research, and experiments.

At the nine-month mark, many tribes were still forming but the direction was very clear. Demand flow had improved, sprint refinement tightened Definition of Ready (DoR), Definition of Done (DoD) and the design team had registered meaningful improvements in access to tools

The largest single gain was research velocity, which was about 75% faster inside the tribes. Business teams that had initially resisted involving customers in new-product launches now all had to pass through test cycles before anything reached production. This was a deliberate gate, introduced for slower but evidence-backed production.  Business teams, themselves still forming, were beginning to better understand the roles and responsibilities of design, while squads that had run more than three full-team cycles (45 days) were starting to sustain continuous research cycles.

The quarterly research/design roadmap and the Ansoff matrix gave business and design a way to debate logically and concretely by putting numbers and evidence on the table, making conversations more transparent, and raising the teams' sense of purpose. By the end of these improvements, the company had entered its first annual cycle of user-centered product development (Dual Track Discovery), an effort that required sustained work from the design teams and a genuine, ongoing commitment from the executive committee.