Yext · 2025 · Lead Product Designer
I led design across three scrum teams on Yext Relate. Design had become a black box: planning guessed at readiness, engineers saw files too late to flag feasibility, and PMs had no view into what was in flight. I rebuilt how design showed up in agile, from kickoff to ship. Handoff satisfaction rose from 48% to 70%, and design was ready one to two sprints earlier.
Overview
In 2025, I led design on Yext Relate as Lead Product Designer, working across three scrum teams, three PMs, and their engineering leads. The product was moving fast, and the way design, PM, and engineering stayed in sync was about to be tested hard.
My role wasn't to ship one feature. It was to change how design showed up, so that trade-offs surfaced in sketches instead of pull requests, and so that PMs and engineers had real visibility into where design was and why.
The challenge
Several large customer commitments landed in the same window, and the pace they demanded stressed every seam. A team that worked well together started to fray at the edges. Design wasn't intentionally siloed, but without shared rituals or visibility under that kind of pressure, it read that way from the outside. The cracks showed up in the same places every sprint.
Discovery
I started with what the teams could tell me. A cross-team survey to size the gaps. An empathy-mapping session to see them from engineering's side. A one-page alignment doc to turn both into rules the PD side could hold itself to.
Six responses across design, PM, and engineering, covering workflow, impact, feedback, documentation, and sharing. The numbers told me where to spend.
Open responses named the same gaps the numbers hinted at: ambiguity at the start of design work, feedback that came late or in batches, and engineers wanting more context before files were final. One respondent put it plainly: "We often don't know what 'ready' means before design starts."
Collaboration didn't need fixing. Clarity and handoff did. The crunch had strained the mechanics, not the relationships.
A working session mapping goals, thinks and feels, pain, and gains from the engineering side. The sticky notes got specific fast:
Three things got obvious. Meetings were a tax, not a tool. Kick-offs were being used for the wrong kind of work. And engineering wanted decisiveness from PD, not more options.
I turned the map into a one-page doc the PD side could hold itself to. Organized by stakeholder group. Blunt by design. A few of the rules:
Not aspirations. Rules you could call a meeting against.
Decisiveness from PD lets him know it's a thing to take seriously. Empathy-mapping session, Relate Eng
The approach
Engineering in the loop earlier. Evidence in every decision. Design synced to the sprint. Work visible before it hardened.
Nothing on the list is exotic. That's what made it hard: under pressure these are the first practices a team cuts, and every one of them spends time the deadlines said we didn't have. The work was making each move cheap enough that a time-starved team would keep it.
Engineering as partner
Before, engineers saw Figma files at ticket time. By then, the only useful feedback was "this isn't feasible," which was too late to shift direction without pain. So I pulled them in early enough that they were co-authors of the direction, not reviewers of the file.
Trade-offs got made on paper instead of in pull requests. Engineering had room to push back before code existed. Mid-crunch, an open weekly hour looked like a luxury; it was cheaper than one reworked pull request.
His designs often have the pragmatic/expedient option, but he also shares a broader vision engineering can work toward. 2025 peer review
Rod consistently seeks early feedback on designs and workflow mockups, fostering productive discussions between design and engineering. 2025 peer review
Evidence over intuition
With the baseline in hand, I built rituals that kept the "why" in front of the team sprint to sprint. No decision should rest on "what Rod thinks" when the team already had the data.
Three practices carried most of the weight:
Design decisions stopped being "what Rod thinks" and started being "what users said last week." Engineers started asking to see the evidence before they saw the designs. And once they held the why, they made the day-to-day calls themselves, the way the research pointed, without waiting for design to be in the room.
Embedded in agile
Design falls out of sync with agile if it runs on its own clock. But the obvious fix, a standing design review, was wrong for a team that had just called meetings a tax. Design had to fit inside the time the teams were already spending.
By the time a ticket was ready, engineering had already seen the work, asked their questions, and signed off on the direction. No large handoffs, no surprise scope. And with design in the room, the small calls got made in the moment, instead of blocking a ticket while a meeting got found.
Rod's decision to regularly join standups when he had updates improved transparency and kept engineering teams aligned with design work. 2025 peer review
He played a key role in strengthening the collaboration between design and engineering this year. 2025 peer review
Working in public
Recruiting engineers had put the right people in the room. PMs and EMs still had no way in, and the instinct when you lead design is to keep it that way: protect the craft, share the finished work, keep the messy work private. Polish hadn't kept handoff satisfaction from sinking to 48 percent; protecting the craft was protecting the problem. The earlier the work was visible, the faster it got better.
Nobody outside design had to ask where the work was; the answer was a link. And because feedback arrived while the work was still soft, most of the hard questions were resolved before high fidelity.
Opening up your work in progress for more frequent feedback from a broader range of stakeholders has actually made you stronger. 2025 peer review
Outcome
Once the new process had a few sprints behind it, I re-ran the alignment survey. Both gaps the baseline flagged had narrowed by more than 20 points, and the day-to-day matched: fewer late-stage feasibility surprises, and shorter planning, because by the time we sat down to plan, everyone already knew where design was.
The bigger shift was cultural. Three scrum teams with a shared vocabulary for design. Engineers asking for rough drafts instead of waiting for final comps. PMs pulling me into strategy, not just execution.
You have high standards for yourself… you're learning how to get your team on that same wavelength, without creating friction or "stoppers" for advancement, but moving alongside them and leading them into doing better things. Diego A. Cabrera, Product Design Manager, Yext
