UPS UX Maturity Assessment.

An honest read on the practice.

UPS brought me in for an outside read on their internal UX/UI team. I ran a maturity assessment using stakeholder interviews, an operations audit, and benchmarking against the standards I see in mature practices. The point wasn't to grade anyone. It was to surface the real gaps, get leadership aligned on what to fix first, and hand them a phased roadmap that moved UX from a tactical function into a strategic partner.

The same work also set the groundwork for scaling research, design systems, and UX operations across the company.

What I did on the engagement.

• Lead UX strategist and assessor on the engagement
• Advisor to the client-side UX/UI leadership team
• Coach and sounding board for the internal UX practitioners

Interviews across the org.

• Sat down with people across UX, Product, Engineering, and the business side
• Mapped how each group actually saw UX: what it was worth to them, how it was resourced, where it slotted into their workflow, and what collaboration looked like in practice

Where the team stood, by capability.

• Scored the team against an adapted UX Maturity Model covering research rigor, design system adoption, UX ops, leadership support, and KPIs
• Looked at where UX was actually showing up across the product lifecycle, not just at handoff

Quick wins and bigger shifts.

• Gave each category a maturity score (Research came in at Emerging, Design Systems at Established, and so on)
• Separated the quick wins, like tighter stakeholder rituals, from the longer plays, like standing up a real UXOps function

Findings turned into a plan.

• Wrote up a detailed findings report and walked executives through it in person
• Proposed a phased roadmap that tightened operations, got UX leadership into the conversations they were being left out of, and pulled research closer to where actual decisions get made

What was holding the practice back.

• UX was being pulled in too late, which kept the work tactical when it needed to be strategic
• Research was happening, but it lived in silos. No shared repository, no shared learnings, every team starting from scratch
• A design system existed, but governance was thin enough that things were drifting across touchpoints
• Leadership believed in UX, but didn't have the language to measure it or defend it when budget conversations came around

What happened after the readout.

I stayed on as UX Director to keep the momentum from stalling once the readout was done. Executive buy-in for expanding the UX function came through by framing it as a business enabler rather than a delivery group. UPS picked up pieces of the roadmap directly, including a ResearchOps pilot and a set of UX KPIs tied to product OKRs. The team shifted away from reactive production support and into genuine strategic partnership with Product and Engineering, backed by new engagement rituals and shared success metrics that made the change visible across the org.

What I took away.

This engagement reinforced something I'd suspected for a while. UX maturity isn't a function of individual talent or how polished the design artifacts look. It's about whether research, strategy, and design thinking are actually wired into how the business makes decisions. Hiring talented designers doesn't fix that problem. Operations do.