Leading the design direction of Afry's UX team at Scania
As UX Design Lead for AFRY's design satellite at Scania, I led about 20 designers alongside a UI Design Lead and two scrum masters. Our team worked alongside Scania's in-house design organisation, sharing responsibility for the Smart Dash, Scania's next generation digital cockpit now live in commercial vehicles across Europe. My scope covered UX direction for the Driver Display and system-wide interaction patterns, owning quality across all team deliverables, bridging design with development, product and engineering, and maintaining alignment with project goals through backlog refinement, PI planning, and close stakeholder collaboration.
Earning Scania's trust came through the ways of working we established together with the team, transparent decisions, clear communication, and a shared understanding of how design and development depend on each other.
Context
Leading design in a large, distributed team on a safety-critical product.
The AFRY design satellite at Scania is a large, distributed team of consultants with end-to-end design capacity, working on a safety-critical product in a complex, multi-team project. High quality design in that environment is built on keeping design aligned with engineering and product as the project evolves, managing risk before it becomes rework, and maintaining a close and trusted relationship with the client. The UX Design Lead role existed to support designers in doing exactly that, while being the primary point of contact for the client.
Challenge
Two opportunities: stronger ways of working inside the team, and rebuilt trust with the client.
Team challenge
Design and development needed a closer relationship and a shared understanding of how their work depended on each other, from early concept through to handoff and documentation. Designers needed clearer direction on where to focus in relation to business and project goals, and the team as a whole needed to work more openly across functions, drawing in perspectives from engineering, architecture, requirements, and Scania's in-house team earlier in the process.
Client challenge
Alongside that, there was an opportunity to rebuild and deepen the relationship with the Scania client, moving from a period of tension toward a more transparent and collaborative way of working together. Creating the right conditions for that kind of openness became one of my primary focuses.
Impact
10 / 10
Client satisfaction
Measured at the end of 2025, after our core team established new ways of working and rebuilt the relationship with the Scania organisation.
Less rework
Design handoff quality improved through closer engineering collaboration
Technical constraints became visible earlier in the process.
Stronger team culture
A more transparent and cross-functional way of working
The team had clearer direction, stronger engagement, and shared ownership.
A team others followed
The sub-team I led became a reference point at AFRY and Scania
From Jira documentation to Figma deliveries.
How we got there
Five process changes that built trust with Scania and shifted how the team worked.
Refined Design Process
I mapped and visualised how our design process intertwined with the development process, making dependencies between teams visible and easier to reason about. This became the foundation for clearer milestones, quality gates, and handoff standards that improved predictability and reduced back-and-forth across teams.
Established Clear Ways of Working
Together with the other leads, I refined the structure of our weekly design reviews, giving them a consistent format: context, rationale, open questions, and next steps. This gave the team a shared rhythm and made design progress legible to stakeholders.
Created Engineering Touchpoints
I drove the work of bringing technical constraints into the design process earlier, before concepts were finalised. By building closer touchpoints with development, engineering, and architecture teams, we reduced rework significantly and improved the mutual understanding between design and development.
Created Onboarding and Offboarding Processes
As part of the core leader team, we developed clear onboarding frameworks and knowledge transfer protocols that allowed new team members to ramp up quickly and ensured continuity across team changes.
Made Design Thinking Visible
I worked to make design decisions and rationale visible and documented throughout the process, keeping the Scania organisation informed and involved. This transparency was central to rebuilding trust and strengthening the client relationship over time.
Reflections
What I took from leading design through trust, role boundaries, and the broader consultancy context.
On trust
This role taught me that the space around design work matters as much as the design itself for building client trust. Through deliberate documentation, communication, and processes we helped the client see the quality of the design work in a way that was trackable over years. Creating the right conditions for designers to do their best work in their own eyes and in the client's eyes simultaneously became the core of what I did.
On leadership
I learned how much of leadership happens in the small everyday details. Team culture lives in the attitude, in the space between people, in whether everyone feels ownership over their work and trust that they can do it in their own way. Building that kind of culture while navigating many competing voices and interests was harder than I expected. Knowing when to act on something, when to redirect it, and when to hold it back to protect the team took time to develop. Equally challenging was knowing the limits of my own role. Where my responsibility ended and where the scrum master's or the other lead's began was not always obvious, and I found myself taking on work that was not mine to carry, sometimes without realising it. Learning to trust others with their part of the work, and to let go of mine when it was done, was something I had to learn in practice.
On consultancy
This role deepened my understanding of the whole context around product design consultancy: the business behind it, the dependencies, and the relationships that make it work. I came out of it a more complete consultant.