TACKLING DESIGN DEBT ACROSS LARGE-SCALE SERVICES
There’s a point in every large organisation where things start to feel… off. Not broken, just misaligned.
For me, that moment came when I started noticing inconsistencies across multiple services. The visuals weren’t quite right. The patterns were drifting. The user experience felt slightly different from one part of the estate to another. No single team had done anything wrong, but something was slipping.
I knew exactly what it was.
Design debt.
WHAT I SAW
This wasn’t just a few rogue buttons or spacing issues. This was systemic. Design debt had started to accumulate quietly across teams, components, journeys and business areas. My 70+ design team and the squads they were a part of was delivering at pace and the debt was growing in the shadows—unseen, untracked and unspoken.
I could feel it impacting the user experience. And I knew it would eventually undermine trust, credibility and confidence in the services that our citizens were using.
So I did what a leader should do, I took accountability.
WHAT I DID
I called it out, formally and informally. I made it visible. In leadership meetings, design crits, 1:1s and show-and-tells, I used real examples to frame the issue. I talked about the risk of “design drift,” about hidden duplication and about the invisible cost of fixing the same things in ten different places.
I set direction. I worked with our heads of role and embedded design leads to run a full inventory of what we had. Each team started documenting their components, screens and patterns. I asked them to annotate where the experience didn’t match the design system, or where the system itself was falling short.
I didn’t just want to know what was wrong. I wanted us to understand why it was happening and where the pain was showing up for users.
Then I brought people together. I initiated sessions with product leads and delivery managers to show how the debt wasn’t just a design problem—it was a delivery risk. I changed the language to make it resonate: missed expectations, duplicated fixes, users re-learning the same task because of inconsistent interfaces.
I guided teams to reframe design debt as part of our product and delivery backlog. This wasn’t “nice to have.” This was design and product hygiene. I helped prioritise fixes based on risk and user impact and worked with our design system team to incorporate findings into their roadmap.
THE OUTCOME
What changed?
- Teams had a shared language and a shared understanding of the problem.
- Product managers saw design consistency as part of delivery quality.
- Designers felt supported in surfacing issues early, without pushback.
- And the design system matured with real-world examples feeding into it, not in isolation.
Solving design debt was done by making it visible. I gave it weight. I created the space, language and structure so others could act on it too.