Embark VeterinaryWhen I joined Embark Veterinary, the company was scaling rapidly with several product lines in development, but design work was scattered across different teams without a cohesive strategy or shared process. This fragmentation was limiting our ability to ship quality products efficiently and create consistent user experiences. I saw the opportunity to transform how design functioned within the organization by building a dedicated team from the ground up.
I developed a hiring rubric that prioritized systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration—skills essential for designers who would need to work embedded within product squads while maintaining design consistency across the organization. Over 18 months, I carefully recruited designers with complementary skill sets and strategically embedded each one with a specific product squad. To ensure we maintained cohesion despite being distributed across teams, I established weekly design critiques that became the foundation of our shared design culture and quality standards.
The impact was significant and measurable. We successfully shipped three major product lines in 18 months, demonstrating our ability to execute at scale. More importantly, we reduced design-to-dev handoff time by 40%, dramatically accelerating our product development cycles. The design system we built enabled faster iteration and created more consistent user experiences across all products. Both the VP of Product and Head of Engineering recognized how the design team fundamentally transformed our ability to ship quality products quickly, turning design from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.
