From Flat to Focused: Leading UX Through Transition

In 2017, TechSmith began a major organizational shift. With Wendy Hamilton stepping in as CEO, the company moved away from its flat structure and introduced more formal management layers across engineering, product, and project management. A new CTO, brought in as part of this transition, led a company-wide move away from waterfall processes toward synchronized agile planning, sprint cycles, and regular 1:1s, establishing more consistent practices across engineering. I was selected as one of the first team leads during this shift, taking on co-leadership of the User Experience Design practice and helping to define what UX leadership would look like in this new environment.

Challenge

As one of two UX team leads reporting to the VP of Engineering, I played a key role in helping shape how UX functioned within a rapidly evolving organization. While supporting a cross-product group of five designers and researchers, I focused on bringing clarity during a time of change, establishing new team norms, building trust, and helping people navigate shifting priorities and agile processes. Keeping the team grounded and connected was just as important as aligning with product and engineering.

Shaping the Team

As we worked to define how UX would operate within the new org structure, we split leadership responsibilities across engineering practices, with one team focused on desktop products and my team focused on UX for SaaS/cloud products. Rather than embedding designers directly into product teams, we established dedicated UX pairs for each product line to ensure no one was working in isolation. We also built research roles directly into each team, giving product decisions a stronger foundation in user insight from the start. This structure created stronger peer collaboration, more balanced workloads, and clearer pathways for mentorship and support.

Driving Product Design

 My team led UX for several cloud products, including Knowmia Enterprise, Video Review, and Knowmia Pro. A key milestone was building a shared design system with front-end developers, improving consistency, speeding up handoffs, and setting the foundation for future efforts like Camtasia Online and the company-wide UI kit used across desktop, cloud, and marketing. We also used research to guide strategy, partnering with Product Managers to identify user needs, create product roadmaps, and prioritize new features, enhancments and bug fixes, as well as validate and iterate designs. 

Tooling Consolidation

When I accepted the Team Lead position, our design team was using a mix of tools:  Sketch, Adobe XD, Marvel App, InVision, Illustrator and even Photoshop. In 2019, we led a tool evaluation process and made the call to move the full team to Figma. It wasn’t perfect at the time, but the collaborative benefits and shared component library made it the right choice. We migrated design files from Sketch, onboarded external vendors, and never looked back.

We faced similar fragmentation in our research tooling. Findings were scattered across SharePoint folders, Google Drive folders, and slide decks. I partnered with the Market Research team and our UX researchers to evaluate and implement Dovetail as a central knowledge base for qualitative research. This made user insights easier to find, share, and build on, improving visibility and impact across teams.

Adapting to Remote Work & Market Shifts

When the pandemic hit, Knowmia Enterprise saw a sudden spike in demand. We shifted quickly to support that growth, changing roadmaps to improve scalability and accessibility of the system on low-bandwidth connections. At the same time, we also adjusted to fully remote work while keeping the team connected and supported, a process made much smoother by our prior adoption of Figma, as well as the power of our own products. 

Cross-Department Collaboration

After Knowmia Enterprise was sunset in early 2021, we reorganized around customer journeys rather than product lines or engineering divisions. My team shifted to support the Snagit journey, while a parallel team focused on Camtasia. Each journey team included designers embedded across marketing, cloud, and desktop, with Snagit and Camtasia designers paired to ensure alignment and shared context within a function. We also embedded a dedicated researcher in each team, giving us a clearer view of the full user experience across touchpoints.

The Outcome

Leading the UX team through these times of change - through multiple company restructures to a global pandemic - pushed me to grow as a leader. We built a resilient, adaptable UX team, implemented a cross-functional design system, transitioned tools, supported major product pivots, and created stronger partnerships across departments. The experience taught me how to lead through ambiguity, scale design practices, and stay focused on the user.