Case Study · Singtel

Building
the Design
Team

Starting from zero — and building a design practice that earned its place at the table.

Case study being expanded

Overview

An island,
with ambition.

When I joined Singtel's Corporate IT business unit, there was no UX design function. Across Singtel, design was decentralised — the Consumer business unit had a team of over ten designers; the Enterprise unit had designers embedded across squads. But Corporate IT, which was responsible for the digital tools and platforms used by Singtel's own employees, had none.

The need was there. The recognition, less so. Design was often equated with visual polish — or, at best, with user journey maps. The idea that a dedicated design function could shape strategy, align stakeholders, and meaningfully improve how employees experienced their work was not yet part of the organisation's vocabulary in this context.

What followed was four years of building — not just a team, but a practice. Establishing how design worked in this context, what it was for, and why it mattered enough to invest in.

The hardest part of building a design team isn't hiring designers. It's helping an organisation understand what design is actually for.

What Was Built

From the ground,
up.

Building the team meant building the conditions for good design to happen. That required attention to infrastructure, process, people, and culture — often simultaneously, and often without a clear playbook.

Ways of working and design processes Established how the team collaborated — with each other, with product managers, with engineers, and with business stakeholders. This included review cadences, feedback practices, and how design decisions were documented and communicated.
Tooling and design infrastructure Set up the team on Figma as part of Singtel's enterprise account, establishing shared libraries, file structures, and conventions that enabled collaboration and consistency across design work.
Growing and mentoring the team Grew the team from a solo function to four designers. Provided mentorship and coaching to help junior and mid-level designers develop their craft, their confidence, and their ability to navigate the organisational context they were working in.
Design advocacy and culture Championed a design-led culture within Corporate IT — educating stakeholders on what UX design encompasses, making the case for early design involvement, and demonstrating the value of human-centred thinking through the work itself.

Obstacles

What made it
difficult.

01
Design was misunderstood The most persistent challenge was the gap between what UX design actually is and what people assumed it to be. Some equated it with visual design — making things look polished. Others understood it as journey mapping, a useful exercise but not the full picture. The depth, rigour, and strategic value of design practice had to be demonstrated, not just described.
02
Being brought in too late Corporate functions teams often didn't involve design early — arriving instead with requirements already formed, looking for execution rather than exploration. Shifting this pattern required building trust incrementally, showing what earlier design involvement made possible, and being persistent without being prescriptive.
03
Operating without a blueprint There was no established design practice to inherit, no norms to follow, and no internal peers who had done this before in this context. Decisions about how to structure the team, what standards to set, and how to position design within the organisation had to be made from first principles — while simultaneously delivering on live projects.

Contribution

Practitioner,
leader, and
advocate.

This work asked for a different kind of design leadership — less about directing creative vision, more about creating the conditions in which good design could consistently happen and be recognised for its value.

DesignOps Team Building Mentorship & Coaching Capability Development Design Advocacy Stakeholder Engagement Design Leadership

Outcomes

What the team
became.

From zero to four The team grew from a solo function to four designers, with an established hiring process, onboarding approach, and clear role expectations.
A functioning design practice Tools, processes, and ways of working were in place — giving the team a shared foundation and reducing the friction of collaboration across design and delivery.
Design recognised as a strategic function Over time, design involvement moved earlier in the process — a signal that the team's value was being understood and trusted, not just tolerated.
BIG Connect shipped The launch of the BIG Connect employee app was the clearest proof point — a complex, organisation-wide product delivered by a team that hadn't existed two years earlier.

Reflection

On building
something from
nothing.

This is the work I'm proudest of — and the hardest to describe in a portfolio, because so much of what matters happened in conversations, in small moments of trust, and in the slow accumulation of credibility that comes from consistently doing good work in a context where the value of that work isn't immediately obvious.

What I've come to believe is that building a design team is fundamentally an act of translation. You are constantly translating between what design can offer and what the organisation is ready to receive. Too far ahead, and you lose people. Too deferential, and the work loses its integrity. The skill is in finding the distance that creates just enough productive tension to move things forward.

I also learned a great deal about patience — not the passive kind, but the kind that stays curious and persistent without becoming frustrated. Organisations change slowly, and the most meaningful shifts often happen so gradually that you only notice them in retrospect. The moment a stakeholder asks for design to be involved earlier, without being pushed, is a moment worth pausing to appreciate.

When BIG Connect launched and employees across Singtel started using it, it felt like an answer to a question the team had been quietly asking for two years: does this work matter? It did.

The best evidence that a design team is working isn't the quality of its outputs. It's how much the organisation has changed around it.

Work in progress — This case study is being progressively documented. Further detail on the team's structure, processes, and specific initiatives will be added over time. What's here reflects the nature of this kind of leadership work — it lives mostly in the practice, not the artefacts.