"We don't need that. We just need this…because we already built so-and-so. That was the requirement from the client."

Among the industry those days when UX was mistaken for UI many of them can relate to that sentence. It was one of my first projects at Ecolab Digital Center, is the whole "before" state in one line. Requirements came in, screens went out. Nobody in the chain was asking who would actually use the thing, on what device, in what environment. Execution was the culture. The user was an abstraction.

When I joined in late 2018, I was the only designer in an organisation of roughly 200–250 people. "UX" on paper meant "UI" in practice. Developers built screens from their own reading of whatever the requirement-giver asked for. My actual mandate, worked out with the Managing Director, was quieter than a title: cover the immediate UI gaps, and find the first team that would genuinely benefit from real UX work.

The first fight: saying no

The first team I embedded with handed me a very specific brief.

"Restructure this UI, clean it up, here's the structure we want."

I said no. Not to the work but to the framing. I needed to know what problem we were solving before I'd move a single element.

That did not go down well. The pushback escalated to the US counterparts, who reached out to ask why the new designer was refusing work. That conversation turned out to be the hinge:

• I walked them through what we were actually trying to solve, the alternative approaches, and the success metrics for each one.

• Then I asked to be connected directly to the client and spent a week working with them daily.

• The solution we landed on didn't bolt a new behaviour onto the product. It folded the client's requirement into the existing flow, so users didn't have to learn anything new, with every edge case covered.

Two things changed after that. The US stakeholders stopped routing work through intermediaries and came to design directly. And then, this part mattered more, I pushed them back toward involving the whole team, because a design function that works via private channels isn't a function, it's a favour.

Proof, then scale

The wins that unlocked everything else came from the products themselves.

The quality-control checklist product. Central teams create inspection checklists. Floor workers at client sites complete them on company devices, often on weak networks, responses feed automated quality checks. Session times were painful and the API call patterns and load behaviour were designed for the office, not the floor. Working with the engineering team on both the interaction design and the request structure, we cut session time to complete complex checklist activities by 28%.

The decommissioning workflow. A critical product process was taking users 4 minutes. We ran brainstorming sessions with the India team and the best part is that developers started volunteering solutions to their own technical constraints once they could see the user problem clearly. We got it to 1 minute.

That's the pattern I've trusted ever since. Don't evangelise UX in meetings. Ship a measurable fix, let the numbers do the politics.

After that, funding followed. I hired the first two designers, 1 UX & 1 UI for a specific project. Then every team realised their requirement for UX. I hired the rest one after another until we were a team of 10+.

Structure: designers embedded in their product teams, but reporting centrally to me. Embedded, so they had context and trust. Central, so knowledge moved between them and nobody rotted in isolation. Plus a standing ritual: Every Friday afternoon reserved for brand improvements and team-driven initiatives, the work that never survives sprint planning.