Building a UX practice from zero
An engineering-led company had no UX practice. Matthaios built one: a team of about ten, a delivery process with senior review, and quarterly quality audits of the team's work.
The situation
An engineering-led company had no UX practice. Its clients included European institutions and academic organisations. Matthaios built the practice from the ground up.
What was at stake
A new design team inside an engineering company has to prove itself in delivery, not in decks. Without shared standards, quality depends on who happens to work on a project.
The decision that mattered
Matthaios made quality measurable. Every quarter the team's files are audited against a short set of measures: 36 file audits across five designers in the last two rounds, plus 198 development tickets in the latest quarter.
The audit also showed what a measure can miss. One designer delivered on time 36% of the time, yet her estimates were 95% accurate: the measure was tracking a sprint convention, not her. One designer's cleanest file and one of her least finished files came from the same quarter. Matthaios holds his own work to the same bar: the first time he ran the 22-point handover check on his own work, he scored 19.
What was done
- Hired the team and set its standards; the practice now has about ten people, working hybrid.
- Introduced methods, and processes for performance improvement and evaluation.
- Set the delivery rhythm: two-week sprints, senior review of every deliverable before it reaches a client, weekly design reviews and monthly retrospectives.
- Built a Figma plugin that scores files against the team's quality measures. It became part of the pre-handoff routine as a visible signal, not a hard gate, and scores improved over the following four weeks.
- For an academic publisher: four applications across web, mobile and interactive boards, with four agile teams.
- For a European agency: a portal used in 38 countries and 28 languages, with more than 50 templates.
Results
- ~10people in a UX practice that did not exist
- 15projects the team worked on in 2025
- 32+applications the team's design system is applicable to
- A European agency client signed five more contracts with the team within a single year.
What lasts
A practice with its own standards and a way to check them.
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