Nova

Leadership and team building

The UX practice was built from the ground up, from hiring through execution. Every UX role was sourced, interviewed, and onboarded under this leadership in close partnership with HR. At scale, the team comprised nine people: five UX designers and four UI developers.

All organizational decisions for the function ran through this role, including final sign-off on every deliverable. Weekly team meetings, regular 1:1s, annual performance reviews, and active mentorship were standard practice, with direct coaching used to close skill gaps and develop designers at every level.

UX project management was also owned here, including backlog prioritization, work assignment, and workflow management through a custom issue-tracking integration purpose-built for the team's process.

Stakeholder and executive engagement

This role held a consistent seat in C-suite and division leadership meetings, representing UX at the strategic level and making the case for design investment across the organization.

Design decisions were translated into business and mission impact for non-design audiences, shifting the perception of UX from a service function to a core driver of contract performance. The final approval checkpoint for all UX work sat here, functioning as the quality and standards gate for the entire discipline.

Cross-functional and technical leadership

A development background enabled fluid operation across both design and engineering. Technical constraints were understood natively, systems architecture conversations were contributed to directly, and the language of the development team was spoken without a translator.

That made the role the connective tissue between design intent and technical execution, reducing friction and accelerating delivery across the organization.

A unified design tooling platform was championed and driven to full organizational adoption, migrating the team from a legacy tool and establishing a single collaborative environment as the company-wide standard. By the end of the engagement, 200+ developers and daily active users were operating inside one shared design organization.

Design process

A custom internal UX process was designed and documented from the ground up. Rather than applying a generic framework, the process used a multi-stage workflow with conditional branch points that adapted based on project type and complexity.

The process was fully integrated into the organization's existing project management tooling, giving every stakeholder clear visibility into design progress at any given moment.

The system

Originally seeded from an established open-source design system, Nova was so thoroughly rearchitected and rebuilt that virtually no original code remained by final release.

The component library grew organically as the ecosystem expanded, starting lean and scaling deliberately as new microapps were integrated. Each addition pressure-tested and enriched the system rather than fragmenting it.

Four major versioned releases managed that growth, each triggered when accumulated changes were significant enough to demand a coordinated, system-wide update to maintain consistency across all 40+ microapps.

Accessibility and color

Accessibility was a contractual requirement, not an afterthought. Every component met WCAG AAA, with a hard floor of AA on all interactive elements.

The color system supported three modes: light, dark, and a hidden high-contrast mode for extreme conditions. Dark mode was a mission requirement for operators working in low-light operational environments around the clock, while light mode served land-based contractors and researchers.

High contrast addressed edge cases where maximum visibility was critical. The token architecture underpinning all three modes was managed through a shared design and development environment, maintaining a single source of truth across a 200+ developer organization.

Documentation

Documentation was a collaborative team effort, led from this role and maintained across the group, built to serve two distinct audiences: UX designers and front-end developers.

At 150+ pages, it covered component usage, accessibility requirements, interaction patterns, and implementation guidance so anyone entering the ecosystem could onboard quickly and stay aligned with the standard.

Impact

Tens of thousands of wireframes and mockups were produced across the engagement. Nova supported mission-critical applications for target acquisition, payload deployment analysis, and tactical decision-making, used daily by defense personnel and contractors, reviewed by senior military and government leadership, and instrumental in securing significant government contracts.