Consulting · Design Practice · 2023

Zero To Sixty

Built Nagarro's design practice from zero — 60 designers across 8 verticals, a culture of craft, and systems that outlasted the engagement.

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01

Problem

No Design Practice

Global tech company with no designers, process, or shared language.

0Designers at start
02

System

Practice Architecture

Hiring model, craft standards, delivery rituals, and client-facing capability.

8Verticals covered
03

Process

Build in Public

Embedded with delivery teams; proved design value through shipped work.

18Months to scale
04

Outcome

Sustainable Practice

Design became a core capability, not a project add-on.

60Designers at peak
Client
Nagarro
Engagement
Design Practice Lead
Duration
18 Months
Primary Outcome
0 → 60 Practice
Stack / Tags
DesignOps · Hiring · Culture

Artifacts from this engagement

ProblemChallenge BriefConstraints and context before the engagement ProcessEngagement PhasesHow the work was structured and delivered SystemSolution ArchitectureWhat was built and how it works OutcomesResults & MetricsMeasurable impact and learnings
DesignOps / Practice Build / Technology

Zero To
Sixty.

Nagarro is a global technology company that builds digital products at scale. In 2019 it had no design practice — no designers, no process, no shared language between product and engineering. This is the story of building one from scratch: 60 designers across 8 verticals, a culture of craft, and the systems that made it last after I left.

0
Designers Hired & Developed
8
Verticals Served
18mo
Zero to Full Practice
2019
Year Initiated
Client
Nagarro
Role
Design Practice Lead
Timeline
18 Months
Outcome
0 → 60 Designer Practice
03
Section 01
The
Problem.
What a global technology company looks like when design is an afterthought — and why that becomes structurally expensive at scale.
Engineering at scale.
Design at zero.

Nagarro had built a formidable engineering organization — thousands of developers, 8 product verticals, clients across Europe, the US, and Asia-Pacific. What it had not built was a design capability. Design decisions were made by product managers and engineers who cared about quality but lacked a shared visual language, a component system, or any systematic approach to user experience.

The consequence wasn't aesthetic — it was operational. Every product team was solving the same interaction problems independently. Onboarding a new engineer took weeks because there were no design specifications they could reference. Client pitches lost to competitors who could show a coherent design vision. And as product complexity grew, the absence of design governance became the single biggest source of rework in the delivery pipeline.

Root Cause · Discovery · Week 1
Design was not absent because Nagarro didn't value it. It was absent because no one had built the infrastructure to make it possible at this scale.
01
No shared component language across 8 verticals. Each vertical had developed its own UI conventions independently. A designer joining one vertical's team couldn't transfer their work to another without complete relearning. The company was rebuilding the same components eight times simultaneously.
02
Design decisions were made by elimination, not intent. Without design leadership, product decisions defaulted to whatever engineering found easiest to build. User experience was the residual output of technical constraints, not the starting point of product decisions.
03
No hiring pipeline, no design culture, no retention framework. Nagarro had never hired designers at scale. There was no career ladder, no portfolio review process, no onboarding programme, and no design culture to attract the kind of talent needed to build something real.
04
Client relationships were under-leveraged. Nagarro's engineering reputation opened doors to clients who needed design strategy — but without a design practice, those conversations couldn't be won. A design practice wasn't just an internal capability. It was a revenue expansion lever.
04
Section 02
The
Process.
18 months. Culture before tooling. System before headcount. Everything built to survive departure.

Culture First.
Tooling Second.

The most common mistake in practice building is leading with tools — Figma licenses, component libraries, design systems. The tools are meaningless without a shared belief in why design matters. The first three months at Nagarro were spent building that belief, not the system. The system came after the culture had something to sustain it.

Practice Growth Timeline · 18 Months · Nagarro
Month 1–3
Foundation
0
Designers
First 3 hires
Culture established
Month 4–7
Expansion
0
Designers
Design system v1
3 verticals active
Month 8–12
Scale
0
Designers
All 8 verticals
Governance live
Month 13–18
Full Practice
0
Designers
Client-facing
Self-sustaining
Post-Handover
Sustained
60+
Practice continues
Independent
No dependency
Headcount growth is the visible metric — the invisible metric is the culture, the system, and the governance that made the number sustainable
01
Diagnosis + Culture Architecture
Months 1–3

Spent the first month embedded across all 8 verticals — not designing anything, just understanding how product decisions were made. Mapped the informal design decisions that engineers were already making and identified the three verticals where design investment would have the highest leverage. Hired the first three designers based on culture fit and growth mindset, not portfolio polish. Ran the first design critique session — the founding ritual of the practice's culture.

02
System Architecture + Design Language
Months 4–7

Built the design system foundation: tokens, typography scale, component hierarchy, spacing system, and interaction principles. The system was built collaboratively with the first three designers — not handed to them. Ownership was built in from the beginning, not retrofitted. Extended the practice to cover three additional verticals and established the vertical design lead model — a senior designer embedded in each vertical with a dotted-line to the central practice.

03
Full-Scale Hiring + Practice Rituals
Months 8–12

Scaled to all 8 verticals simultaneously. Built the hiring pipeline: portfolio review rubric, design challenge framework, pair-critique interview format. Established the practice rituals that became the cultural infrastructure — weekly cross-vertical design review, monthly system contribution sprints, quarterly design leadership sessions. Every ritual was designed with the explicit goal of working without me in the room.

04
Client-Facing Capability + Governance Transfer
Months 13–18

Transitioned the practice from internal capability to client-facing differentiator. Ran the first three client engagements where design led the pitch. Built the governance documentation: contribution guidelines, component review process, design decision log framework, career ladder from Associate Designer to Design Principal. Handed over the practice lead role to the most senior designer grown from within the team — the only indicator of a successful practice build that actually matters.

05
Section 03
The
System.
Three layers — culture, tooling, governance — built simultaneously so each reinforces the others.
01
01
Culture
Infrastructure
The weekly design critique, monthly system contribution sprint, and quarterly design leadership review weren't meetings — they were culture. Each ritual had a specific function: critique built collective taste and psychological safety simultaneously. Contribution sprints gave every designer agency over the shared system. Leadership sessions surfaced the practice's strategic direction before it became a problem. The rituals are the practice; everything else is documentation.
02
02
Design System
v1 → v3
Built three versions of the design system across 18 months — v1 was foundational (tokens, typography, core components), v2 added vertical-specific pattern libraries, v3 introduced the contribution model that allowed vertical designers to propose additions with a structured review process. The system was designed to grow without central bottleneck — any designer could contribute, the review committee was distributed, and the documentation was written for engineers, not designers.
03
03
Hiring Pipeline
& Career Ladder
Designed a portfolio review rubric that evaluated process over polish — the biggest predictor of long-term fit in a consulting environment is how a designer thinks, not what their work looks like. Built a career ladder from Associate to Principal with defined competencies at each level — not just a title structure, but a growth pathway. The ladder reduced attrition by giving designers a trajectory they could see, not just a role they were in.
04
04
Vertical Design
Lead Model
Each of the 8 verticals had a senior designer embedded as the vertical design lead — owning the design quality and process for that vertical's product portfolio, reporting to both the vertical product head and the central practice. This structure solved the classic consulting design problem: deep context within the vertical, shared language and standards across the practice. Neither silo nor centralization. A federated model that scaled.

The practice was built to serve all 8 of Nagarro's product verticals — not sequentially, but in three waves that allowed each wave to learn from the previous one before the next was added.

01
Healthcare
Patient-facing digital products and clinical workflow tools
Wave 1
02
Financial
Banking platforms, insurance products, wealth management
Wave 1
03
Retail
E-commerce, in-store digital, and supply chain visualisation
Wave 1
04
Logistics
Fleet management, warehouse ops, last-mile tracking
Wave 2
05
Media
Content platforms, streaming, publishing infrastructure
Wave 2
06
Travel
Booking systems, loyalty platforms, airport operations
Wave 2
07
Automotive
Connected vehicle interfaces, dealer systems, fleet monitoring
Wave 3
08
Enterprise
Internal tools, workflow automation, data visualisation
Wave 3
06
Section 04
The
Outcome.
18 months. 60 designers. A practice that ran without its founder the day after handover.
60
0
Designers Built
From zero. Hired, onboarded, and developed into a functioning design practice across 8 product verticals.
8
8
Verticals Covered
All 8 Nagarro product verticals served with embedded design leads and shared system access by month 12.
3
0
Client Pitches Won
First three external design-led engagements won in months 15–17 — design as a revenue lever, not just a delivery function.
0
18
Months to Full Practice
Zero to a self-sustaining, client-facing design practice with governance, career ladder, and independent leadership.
The
Handover
Test
The only real measure of a practice build is whether it continues without the person who built it. The Nagarro practice had a promoted-from-within design lead in position six months before handover. The transition was not an event — it was a gradual transfer of context, authority, and decision-making that had been in motion since month 12. On the day of formal handover, nothing structurally changed. That is the only outcome that matters in practice-building engagements.
Culture
Over
Tools
Nagarro's practice outlasted every tool it used in the first 18 months. The design software changed. The component library was rebuilt twice. The file structure was reorganized. What didn't change were the weekly critique, the contribution model, and the shared belief that design is an infrastructure decision, not an aesthetic one. Culture outlasts tooling. This is not a philosophical statement — it is an operational observation from 18 months of evidence.
Design as
Revenue
The client pitch wins in months 15–17 were not an accident. They were the consequence of 15 months of building visible design capability — a coherent portfolio, a trained team that could present work to clients, and a design system that could be demo'd in a proposal context. The practice became a business development asset the moment it had enough depth to be credible externally. Building internal capability and external credibility simultaneously requires a very specific sequence — and that sequence was explicit from the first month of the engagement.
07
Section 05
Key
Learnings.
What building a design practice from zero teaches that no other engagement can.
01
01
Culture Before System.

A design system without a design culture is documentation no one reads. Building the critique practice, the collaborative rituals, and the shared vocabulary first meant that when the system arrived, there was already a community that cared about it. The sequence is not optional. Culture enables system adoption. System without culture is shelfware.

02
02
Hire for Process,
Not Portfolio.

In a consulting environment, the designer who can articulate their thinking to a client at 9am and contribute to a system sprint at 3pm is more valuable than the designer with the best-looking portfolio. The portfolio review rubric weighted communication ability, process articulation, and collaborative evidence equally with the quality of the work itself. The practice's retention rate validated this prioritisation.

03
03
The Leader Must
Become Redundant.

Every decision made over 18 months was evaluated against one question: does this create dependency on me, or does this distribute capability to the team? The goal of the practice lead is to make the practice lead role unnecessary. This is structurally uncomfortable — it requires building successors actively, transferring authority continuously, and measuring success by how little the team needs you, not by how much they do.

04
04
The Federated Model
Scales Cleanly.

Centralised design practices fail when the centre becomes a bottleneck. Fully distributed practices fail when standards fragment. The vertical design lead model — embedded context, shared system — solved both failure modes simultaneously. The vertical lead had full autonomy within the vertical and full accountability to shared standards across the practice. Neither of those conditions could exist without the other.

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Building a Practice
from Zero?

The Nagarro engagement is the origin of DesignOps 360 — the engagement model built for organisations that need to build design capability at scale, not just improve what they already have. If you're starting from nothing, that's exactly the brief that produces the most durable outcomes.

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