I was placed as a solo designer, along with a part-time design manager, on a 4-month engagement with a Fortune 10 financial company. The team we joined was small but mighty – in charge of managing and affecting user accounts worth billions of dollars. They originally had a design lead who laid out a plan but currently had no designers and were unable to adapt the old plan to their current needs.

During my time there, I went from strictly designing exactly what was asked of me to pushing the boundaries on design and asking for feedback to bringing in business stakeholders to participate directly in design planning. I worked mainly with two engineering squads, led by two separate PMs, in charge of different priorities within the product and was able to bring them together and encourage more collaborative work.