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 10 UX designers. I worked together with a UI Design Lead and two scrum masters in a leading core team. AFRY's design satellite team worked alongside Scania's in-house design organisation, sharing responsibility for Scania's next generation digital cockpit, the Smart Dash, 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 and engineering, and maintaining alignment with project goals through backlog refinement, PI planning, and close stakeholder collaboration.
Context
A distributed design team building a client relationship over years.
The AFRY design satellite at Scania is a distributed team of consultants with end-to-end design capacity. We've been working with Scania since the early days of the Smart Dash project, until the release, and now beyond for quality assurance and bug fixes. 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. The UX Design Lead role existed to support designers to keep working in a way that maintains that trust, while being the primary point of contact for the client.
Challenge
Stronger ways of working between teams, and rebuilt trust with the client.
Team challenge
When I started my Design Lead role the team needed to strengthen the relationship to development with 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 leading 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
Making the design process visible across teams, and trust easier to earn.
Visualised shared process touchpoints
I 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 reduced back-and-forth across teams.
Improved the design documentation process
I worked to create a better shared way for designers to document design work across Figma, Jira and Confluence to make design decisions and rationale visible throughout the process, keeping the Scania organisation informed and involved. This transparency was central to rebuilding trust and strengthening the client relationship over time.
Refined weekly design reviews
Together with the other leads, I refined the structure of our weekly design reviews, giving them a consistent and more collaborative format. This gave the team a shared rhythm and made the client presentations more aligned and legible.
Improved the onboarding and offboarding processes
As part of the leading core team, we developed clear onboarding frameworks and offboarding protocols that allowed new team members to ramp up quickly and ensure the right knowledge transfer when leaving the project.
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 the boundaries of my role was something I had to learn in practice over time.
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.