Global Relay

Designing clarity and trust in a global compliance platform

Context

Global enterprise platform for compliant communication · Mobile, desktop and web · Used by regulated financial organisations · Complex workflows across messaging, voice, search and AI · High trust and reliability requirements

Ownsership

Senior UX Design Manager. Responsible for experience direction across the communication platform, coaching designers and aligning product, engineering and leadership around clarity, consistency and scalable delivery.

Scale

15 designers · 20+ squads · Global teams · Mobile, desktop and web · Enterprise and regulated domain.

The challenge

Global Relay provides communication and compliance solutions to financial institutions operating in highly regulated environments. As the product ecosystem expanded across messaging, voice, search and AI capabilities, the experience became fragmented across workflows, platforms and teams.

Customers needed clarity and consistency in high-stakes environments where trust, reliability and speed were critical. Internally, teams worked across mobile, desktop and web, often making local optimisation decisions that created long-term complexity.

At the same time, the business needed to accelerate delivery while maintaining quality and compliance. The opportunity was to create a more coherent platform experience and strengthen alignment across teams.

Scope

I led design across the unified communication platform, supporting more than 20 squads and working closely with product and engineering leadership to improve coherence, quality and delivery speed.

The focus was on:

  • Consistency across platforms

  • Scalable design systems

  • Clearer workflows

  • Stronger collaboration

My role

I grew and coached a distributed team, introduced clearer ownership and improved collaboration across London and Vancouver.

I also helped shape product direction by:

  • Defining experience principles

  • Supporting discovery and alignment

  • Enabling faster decision-making

  • Balancing short-term delivery with long-term coherence

Key moves

Establishing shared experience principles

Defined a small set of principles focused on consistency, findability and clarity. These helped teams make better trade-offs and reduced fragmentation.

Strengthening alignment and critique

Introduced structured critique and global alignment rituals, improving quality and reducing rework across offices and disciplines.

Scaling the design system

Improved documentation, governance and adoption, and supported the creation of a dedicated system team.

Enabling ownership and autonomy

Introduced DRIs and pairing frameworks, allowing designers to make decisions closer to the work while maintaining coherence.

Improving discovery and planning

Strengthened collaboration with product and engineering, improving strategy and reducing design debt.

Speed vs platform coherence

One recurring tension was balancing speed with long-term platform coherence. Some product teams prioritised rapid feature delivery to meet immediate customer and regulatory needs, while others pushed for stronger consistency across the ecosystem.

Rather than slowing delivery with heavy governance, we focused on a small set of shared experience principles and lightweight alignment rituals. This allowed teams to move quickly while making more consistent decisions, improving both short-term delivery and long-term scalability.

Automation vs control

Another challenge was introducing more automation and system-driven workflows without reducing user trust. In regulated environments, customers often prefer manual control, even when automation could improve efficiency.

We worked closely with product and compliance teams to design predictable and transparent automation, giving users clear visibility and override options. This helped build confidence and increased adoption while reducing operational friction.

These tensions reinforced the importance of designing for clarity and confidence, especially in complex and regulated domains.

Impact on product direction

The work shifted the focus from local optimisation to platform thinking. Teams began to prioritise long-term coherence, clarity and trust, enabling the organisation to scale more effectively.

Outcomes

The work helped shift design from a delivery function to a strategic partner in shaping product direction. By focusing on clarity, consistency, and decision-making, the organisation moved from fragmented experiences to a more coherent, scalable platform.

Improved alignment and decision quality

Clear experience principles and structured critique enabled teams across London and Vancouver to make faster, more consistent decisions. This reduced rework and created stronger confidence across product and engineering.

Reduced design debt and fragmentation

A focus on consistency and findability, combined with stronger planning and system adoption, reduced design debt by approximately 75%. This created a more stable foundation for scaling the platform.

Faster and more predictable delivery

Improved collaboration and clearer ownership allowed simpler work to move from three sprints to two, while enabling teams to explore “day one” solutions more quickly and safely.

Stronger system adoption and scalability

Better documentation, education and governance increased design system adoption and supported the creation of a dedicated system team. This enabled product teams to move faster while maintaining coherence.

Increased trust and credibility

As design became more aligned with business outcomes, the team gained greater trust from stakeholders and leadership. This led to earlier involvement in strategy and stronger influence on roadmap decisions.

Improvement in the designer’s decision-making

This experience reinforced my belief that scaling design is less about process and more about improving the quality of decisions across the organisation.

A key trade-off

Balancing speed with long-term coherence. Some teams prioritised rapid feature delivery, while others pushed for platform consistency. The challenge was enabling both without slowing the business.

What I learned

Scaling product quality requires clear principles, strong ownership and systems that support autonomy. This experience shaped how I approach platform and AI-driven products today.