The Ascent Design Practice

The problem

Ascent was a digital transformation consultancy, three to four thousand people, spread across the UK, Malta, Bulgaria, Spain and Portugal, running Agile, product-led engagements for clients across healthtech, space, retail, government and enterprise. Design wasn't a practice there, though. It was whatever the person staffed on a given engagement happened to bring to it.

That meant no consistent roles, no repeatable way to run a discovery or a workshop, and nothing Sales could point to when a client asked what design would actually get them. Every engagement started from a blank page, and design's value inside the business was invisible outside the room it happened in.

The approach

I joined as UX Lead, and from day one I was also staffed directly on client-facing engagements. Building the practice was never a dedicated mandate with protected time, it had to happen in whatever space was left around delivering live client work, and that constraint shaped almost every decision I made about how to build it.

The real challenge wasn't designing a good UX practice in the abstract, it was shaping one that could actually work inside a consultancy: an offering Sales could sell and clients would pay for, and one that let design genuinely help solve problems and bring value Ascent hadn't been able to offer before. To ground it in something more than opinion, I researched widely across Design Thinking, Lean UX, Agile UX, research methods and workshop formats, and mapped all of it out to work out what would actually hold up inside a consultancy's pace and structure.

From there I kept a continuous back-and-forth with Sales, testing what the market actually wanted and pressure-testing whether what I was proposing could be sold at all, rather than designing the practice in isolation and hoping it landed. Part of that shaping work was building my own version of an Agile loop, adapted to how design actually needed to move inside client engagements rather than borrowed wholesale from a textbook.

Delivering that model meant building the hiring side just as deliberately: interview processes, evaluation tasks, and clear criteria for what a senior, full-stack designer at Ascent actually needed to cover. I recruited, onboarded and mentored two senior designers into those roles, with real coaching and goal-setting behind their growth rather than leaving it to chance.