EndeavourX Design

Creating a connected team to elevate collaboration, consistency, and craft excellence while working remotely | 2020-2025

The challenge

The design practice at EndeavourX grew rapidly to meet the demand of online shopping brought on by pandemic lockdowns. Lacking consistent frameworks, processes, and coaching to ensure high-quality, user-centred solutions across squads, Designers were embedded in Product teams operating in silos, with varying approaches to UX, UI, and accessibility.

Without a centralised capability-building strategy, it was difficult to maintain design quality at scale, align delivery with business goals, and support the career growth of individual team members.

Our goal

Ultimately, the goal was to make design a competitive advantage for the business.

To uplift product design capability across all squads by developing scalable frameworks, strengthening design craft, improving consistency, and creating a culture of collaboration, review, and continuous learning.

My role

As Design Chapter Lead at Endeavour Group, I:

• Managed a multidisciplinary team of Product, UI, UX and Service Designers.

• Scaled and led the UI Design capability, growing the team from 5 to 16 UI designers ensuring squads were resourced with the right skills and levels of capability at the right time.

• Improved design operations to align people, process, and craft across chapters and squads.

• Created and embedded a capability framework to guide career growth and skills development.

• Established regular Design Critiques, craft workshops, and knowledge-sharing sessions to deepen skills across interaction design, accessibility, and systems thinking.

• Collaborated with Design Leadership team to drive design strategy anchored to business strategy, and build a culture where team members felt supported, engaged, challenged and ultimately had fun.

• Partnered with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Brand to ensure design quality, reusability, and cross-channel consistency.

• Developed ‘EndeavourX Playbook’ – a one-stop guide of our agile ways of working and systems for all new team members and contractors.

My wins

As Design Chapter Lead over the past 5 years at Endeavour Group, I:

• Held space for team members to feel psychologically safe, comfortable to bring their authentic selves to work and share their unique challenges

• Maintained 100% ‘Trust in Manager’ score in annual Voice of Team survey results

• Saved over USD$110,000 annually by auditing and rationalising design tools and processes to improve efficiency

• Prevented potential fines exceeding GBP£250,000 by ensuring proper font licensing compliance

• Ensured 100% completion of regulatory training by all team members

• Hired and onboarded 20+ designers, helping scale the Design Practice from 7 to 55 members across multiple design disciplines

• Interviewed and supported hiring or promotion of 10+ chapter leads across Design, Data & Business Analyst practices

• Led the early strategy and growth of the MIXER Design System saving approximately 12 hours per week by establishing reusable components and UI libraries

• Bonus metric: once a month I led Endeavour’s volunteer group at Earlybird Café, regularly joined by my Chapter members, cooking and serving hot breakfasts to over 100 of Sydney’s homeless.

Outcomes

As the first chapter lead recruited by the Design Practice Lead, I helped scale the Design practice to 6 chapters each with their own capability leads. Together as a leadership team, we scaled Design from 7 to 55 designers at its peak in 2023. Outcomes included:

• Uplifted design maturity, resulting in more consistent, accessible, and brand-aligned experiences for Dan Murphy’s, BWS and hotels.

• Reduced sprint delivery times by at least 30% through the introduction of a scalable design system and reusable components.

• Improved cross-functional collaboration, increasing design influence in product roadmaps and decision-making.

• Established strong relationships with Marketing, Brand, Creative and eCom functions to ensure Design supported a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints.

• Built a strong culture and highly connected team who were deeply collaborative, able to support each other, celebrate wins, fundraise and volunteer together, and have a lot of fun along the way – despite only coming together in person once or twice a year.

The end of an era

June 2025: A major organisational restructure saw hundreds of roles impacted across the business, including myself and my chapter. It marked the closure of the design practice in its existing form, bringing significant change to our team and the way design operated within the organisation.

Learnings

Leading a design chapter at EndeavourX was not without challenges, and much of the work was invisible. At Endeavour, change was the only constant, and was not always communicated well by the business leaving Chapter Leads to pick up the pieces, translate new business goals and guide the team to get onboard with the changes and support them as they adjusted.

• It is important to stay agile, adapt through ambiguity, and support team members through poorly communicated or unpopular change.

  • It can be difficult to remain authentic, genuine and transparent as you support your people through change

  • Empathy for the business, stakeholders and team members is critical.

• Investing in team culture and connection is essential for engagement and retention, especially in remote environments. Keep things fun and make time to connect.

• Clear frameworks and rituals help maintain design quality and consistency at scale.

• Regular critique and feedback loops strengthen both craft and confidence.

• Empowering designers with autonomy, support, and feedback leads to better outcomes.

• Keeping up with industry trends and current job descriptions in market is important to help designers be ready for career progression or their next role.

• Redundancy impacts everyone differently. In my final two weeks at Endeavour, I felt the weight of the team’s emotions and focused on ensuring they left as prepared as possible for the job market. I’m most proud of that time, bringing people together as a supportive community, offering strength, positivity, and connection to help them process the change and move forward.

“We are NOT all in the same ‘Boat’. We are in the same ‘Storm’. Some have yachts. Some have canoes. And some are drowning. Just be kind and help when you can.”
~ Sign seen at a train station