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 full expansion 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 tooling, much as a technology company would, but inside the constraints of finance: banking structures (agencies and transactional data), judicial matters, and 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, and keeping it healthy takes continuous nurturing from everyone on it.”

The design chapter spanned six expertise tracks: 9 UX Researchers, 7 in DesignOps (product/service designers, illustration, motion, interns), 8 Design Leads, 2 UX Writers, 6 in Design Systems, and 25 Product Designers, roughly 57 people in all. 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 agreements I negotiated with the CPO, Directors, Agile Chapter and the other UX Managers. The team's mandate consolidated into three attributions: strategic solutions and investigations on H2/H3 horizons, plus 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 ran across four tracks: Career guidance, Product Discovery for Design Leaders; vendors, license, legal, accessibility and cybersecurity coordination for DesignOps; research-fundamentals training for Product Designers and operational management (DesignOps and UX Research). The throughline I set for myself was a single mission: fostering a culture of customer-centricity across 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: 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.

Large teams growing exponentially tend to dilute technical knowledge and distribute it unevenly, as people leave and as 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.

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.

Teams still in their forming ('storming') stage were learning how to build better products; the risk was breaking the learning cycle. My priority was to keep discovery continuous and accelerate customer participation in research so the team's learning never stalled.

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.

This was among the company's most pressing concerns, both for the cost of hiring and for the unpredictability it introduced into delivery. My main approach was to strip out as many impediments as possible so the team could resolve its day-to-day work efficiently.

1. Organized the resource set — — access, licenses, and tools for UX Researchers.
2. Acquired new tools — to raise the team's efficiency.
3. Introduced a research-and-process Kanban — to make work-in-progress visible to everyone.
4. Built a research repository — for fast access by business and product teams.
5. Created a repository for sensitive terms and data — (cybersecurity + LGPD/GDPR).
6. Measured team lead time — and 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, so 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 already clear. Demand flow improved, sprint refinement tightened (DoR and DoD) and the design team registered meaningful gains in access to tools.

The largest single gain was research velocity: 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 a deliberate gate, traded for slower but evidence-backed shipping. Business teams, themselves still forming, were beginning to understand design's roles and responsibilities better; tribes/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, putting numbers and evidence on the table, making conversations more transparent, and raising the teams' sense of purpose. By the end, the company had entered its first annual cycle of user-centered product development (Dual Track Discovery): an effort that demanded sustained work from the design teams and a genuine, ongoing commitment from the executive committee.