Executive Summary:
I led the design vision and strategy for nCino’s largest business unit, directing 22 teams of engineers, product managers, and designers with 9 direct reports. Our work impacted over 10 million users, reached 35% of our market share, and contributed to achieving a world-class NPS rating of 72. Additionally, I played a key role in unifying and expanding our global design team, growing it to 30 designers worldwide.
Imagine being part of a mid-sized company that’s just been acquired. Unexpectedly, the parent company—four times your size—asks you to expand your design system and user experience best practices to the entire organization. That’s exactly where I found myself at nCino.
Over the next two years, we acquired 4 more companies, which created a whirlwind of products, team cultures, processes, design systems, career frameworks, time zones, and countries.
With our design team growing from 12 to 30, the challenge was clear: how do we unify a design organization and craft a shared product vision at a global enterprise scale?
This was my approach:
1
How I motivate my team and attract top talent.
2
Scaling Design, Research, and Data Ops ⬇️
How I remove blockers and scale my team's impact.
3
How I create a compelling product vision and strategy
1. Building My Design Team 🤝
Creating a cohesive user experience in a multi-product company starts with a unified design team. But when designers are spread across offices, countries, and time zones, building that unity can be challenging.
Bringing designers together through off-sites
To bridge these gaps, we host multi-day, in-person off-sites once or twice a year, bringing the entire team together under one roof. These team retreats give designers space to connect, build relationships, spark creativity, and think big together.
Though planning them takes significant effort, the results are transformative. These off-sites have strengthened our bonds, inspired collaboration across boundaries, sparked innovation, and become a cornerstone of our design team culture.
While our team off-sites are powerful, they only happen 1-2 times a year. As we continue to grow, we’ve had to adapt and find ways to foster collaboration between these events. Some of the most significant rituals that we have implemented include the following:
🎓 User Experience University (UXU): These bi-weekly workshops and presentations are an opportunity for us to share knowledge and train each other on design topics.
🎨 Design Critique: Every week, we gather to present our work and receive feedback from the team. This is a chance for us to improve our craft together and ensure coherency throughout the product.
💻 Show & Tell Friday: Each Friday, we share a 1-minute video showcasing our work from that week. This provides an opportunity for us to see what everyone is working on and stay connected.
🏢 Team Collaboration Tuesdays: While several of us are remote, we still try to gather in person on a regular basis for those who are near our headquarters.
🍣 Sushi Welcome Lunches: When a new designer starts, we go out and get sushi together. This results in a warm welcome and memorable first day with the design team.
By implementing these rituals, we have been able to maintain a strong sense of camaraderie and collaboration, even as our team continues to grow.
It’s the little moments like these that break down silos and unite a team.
Though we've adjusted our rituals and summits as our team has grown, our team principles have remained steadfast. These principles—distinct from design principles—embody the qualities of a genuine team player. Weekly, we reflect on and engage in an open dialogue on 1 of our 12 team principles.
Each principle has its own page with an in-depth discussion guide.
Let’s be honest: no designer dreams of working for a B2B SaaS banking tech company they’ve never heard of. But they do dream of joining a team where they’re valued, inspired, and able to make an impact.
When our hiring pipeline and referral networks ran dry—and we still had three critical roles to fill—I knew it was time to think differently. So I designed a compelling job ad deck that showcased our team’s culture and shared it with the design community. The result? A 5.4x increase in our talent pipeline, attracting top-tier candidates to our growing team.
18 Roles
I've helped hire
24 Days
Average time to hire
I’m passionate about nurturing early-career talent, so I partnered with HR to create our design internship program from the ground up.
To attract promising candidates, I attended career fairs, spoke at student events, and gave back to the design community through mentorship and outreach. Over the years, we’ve welcomed 4 interns, all of whom transitioned to full-time roles—a 100% conversion rate.
2. Scaling Design, Research, and Data Ops 📈
I believe great leaders don’t just contribute; they act as force multipliers for their teams. As the design organization scaled rapidly, I focused on building infrastructure to support sustainable growth. This included evolving our design system, research operations, and data analytics.
As nCino acquired four more companies, our product ecosystem became fragmented, with five separate design systems causing inefficiencies for designers and engineers. Customers also voiced frustrations that our products didn’t feel like a unified “One nCino.”
To address this, my business unit’s design system—the most mature at the time—became the foundation for a bold initiative: creating a global nCino design standard. By consolidating five design systems into one, including Figma libraries, code libraries, and documentation, we streamlined workflows for designers and engineers, delivering a consistent brand and user experience across all products.
This was a massive multi-year effort and we certainly encountered obstacles, but I am so proud of all the individuals and teams that made this happen.
Our research efforts accelerated when recruiting users became this easy. At one point, we were running 10 simultaneous research studies concurrently.
After spearheading the implementation of Pendo within my business unit, I noticed a significant gap in data insights across the company. Teams struggled to answer fundamental questions like, “How many users are engaging with our product?” or “Where are users getting stuck?”
To execute this, I partnered with our product operations team and organizational leaders to expand our data analytic tools company-wide. I led the effort in establishing global best practices and documentation as well as training multiple business units on how to leverage data to inform product decisions.
When you cultivate a team of top talent and empower them with the right tools, you can build a winning product. However, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture. That’s where a compelling product vision comes in.
Lots of workshops, stakeholder reviews, and presentations.
As I supported each domain in establishing their goals and vision, I then worked to integrate their aspirations into a unified, comprehensive product vision. Using my background as a product manager, designer, and developer, I helped formulate multi-year strategies to build toward that vision through actionable, incremental releases.
As a leadership team, we struggled to identify and agree on a single North Star metric to measure the success of our product and progress towards our vision. Eventually, we decided to balance three key metrics, forming our "North Star constellation".
I proposed dividing our leadership team into 3 groups, each owning a specific metric. I led the initiative with my group for measuring and reporting on our user satisfaction metric.
As each team pursued their part of the vision, we used regular product audits to ensure interface cohesion as our product scaled across multiple domains and user roles. These audits helped uncover weak points in our architecture and opportunities to improve our design system.
By building my design team, scaling our operations, and crafting a clear product vision and strategy, I helped my business unit drive growth. Today, our product is used by 35 of the top 50 mortgage lenders. It touches 1 in 3 loans in the U.S. and impacts over 10 million users with an NPS of 72. Additionally, nCino's design team grew from 12 to 30 designers.
10 Million
Users impacted
72 NPS
World-class rating
1 in 3
U.S mortgage loans
35 of 50
Top mortgage lenders
12 → 30
Design team headcount
5.4x
Increase in talent pipeline
So yes, it's been a whirlwind, and I’m truly humbled by the journey I’ve shared with my design and leadership teams. The road has been challenging, and while we’re still building toward our vision, I couldn’t be more grateful for the incredible people that made it all possible.
I would love to share the full version with you. Connect with me on Linkedin, email me at mitchclements.design@gmail.com, or send me a message below.