What is the best structure for a UX team?

Nielsen Norman Group says there is no best model. The three common ones are centralised, embedded in product teams and hybrid, and the right choice depends on company size and UX maturity.

Who should a company hire first for UX?

The GOV.UK Service Manual says that in discovery it’s often best to hire an interaction designer first. A user researcher follows, working with the team at least 3 days a week.

How do you measure a company’s UX maturity?

Nielsen Norman Group’s model has six stages, assessed across four factors: strategy, culture, process and outcomes. Maturity can slip, so it is worth reviewing regularly, for example monthly.

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Guide1 November 20265 min read

How to bring a UX team into your company

Where UX should sit, who to hire first, the rituals that connect it to product and engineering, and how to measure progress.

$Cover for “How to bring a UX team\ninto your company”: A board of coloured notes, with three team members in front of it.$

A founder hires the company’s first designer. Six months later, the designer spends most days drawing screens for features that were decided in a meeting they weren’t invited to, a week before engineering starts building them. Nobody has spoken to a customer. The hire wasn’t the mistake. Where the designer sits, and how the work reaches them, is.

Where UX sits

Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), a UX research and consulting firm, describes three common ways to organise a UX team:

Centralised. All designers and researchers report to one UX manager and are assigned to projects, like an internal agency. Methods are shared, careers have a path and less work is duplicated. The risk is that UX becomes “out of sight, out of mind” and lacks deep knowledge of any one product.
Embedded (decentralised). Each designer sits inside a product team and reports to it. Trust and product knowledge grow, and design is part of planning. The risk is a lone designer who is outnumbered and spends more time persuading than designing. Nobody looks after how UX work is done across the company.
Hybrid (matrix). The product lead gives day-to-day direction while a UX manager looks after craft and career. It is more flexible, but people can feel pulled between two managers.

NN/g is clear that “there is no best model”. In its survey of 557 UX and design professionals, the split was almost even: 29% centralised, 32% decentralised and 31% hybrid, and companies with hybrid teams were significantly larger than those with centralised ones. NN/g also notes a common path for in-house teams: start embedded, consolidate into a central team, then move to a matrix as the organisation grows.

The first hires

The GOV.UK Service Manual, the UK government’s guide to building digital services, says a service needs a multidisciplinary team: a mix of roles that work together to design, build and improve it. Alongside the product manager and developers, its list includes a user researcher, a designer and a content designer.

For the first hire, it suggests that in discovery, the early phase of exploring a problem, “it’s often best to hire an interaction designer”: someone who designs how people move through a product. The second role to plan for is a user researcher. GOV.UK expects researchers to work with the team at least 3 days a week and to run research sessions at least every 2 weeks. Research is a job, not a favour someone does when there’s time.

One practical point follows from NN/g’s warning about lone designers being outnumbered, especially in companies new to UX. If you can only hire one person, hire someone senior enough to push back, and make sure a leader in the company backs them openly.

Rituals with product and engineering

A ritual is a meeting that happens on a fixed rhythm, whether or not there is a crisis. Three are enough to start:

Regular research that the whole team watches. GOV.UK advises at least one round of research every 2 weeks, and says everyone on the team should observe at least 2 hours of research every 6 weeks.
Show and tell. A short, regular session where the team shares what it has learned with colleagues and stakeholders. GOV.UK recommends regular show and tells to share research findings.
Design critique. A group conversation about whether a design meets its goals. NN/g’s Sarah Gibbons writes that critiques should be cross-disciplinary, and that developers who see designs early can raise feasibility concerns while things are still easy to change. She suggests starting with 30 minutes a week.

Start with research and quick wins

You don’t need a large study to begin. In a well-known article from 2000, Jakob Nielsen argued that testing with 5 users finds about 85% of the usability problems in a design, based on his model, and that it is better to run 3 small studies of 5 users, fixing problems between rounds, than one study of 15.

So pick one journey that matters to the business, such as sign-up or checkout. Watch five people try it, fix the clearest problems and test again. NN/g’s Kate Moran writes that “one or two high-visibility projects can act as case studies” for what UX can do, and stresses recruiting advocates, ideally people in leadership roles.

Measuring progress

NN/g’s UX maturity model describes six stages of how well an organisation uses UX: absent, limited, emergent, structured, integrated and user-driven. It looks at four factors: strategy (leadership and resources), culture (knowledge and careers), process (how research and design are done) and outcomes (whether results are defined and measured).

Use it as a mirror, not a scorecard. In 2025, NN/g’s Kate Kaplan argued that maturity is “a living system” rather than a ladder: it can slip after a change of leadership, a budget cut or a reorganisation. She recommends building check-ins into normal routines, such as a monthly UX health review based on the four factors. Alongside that, track the outcome of the journeys you fixed, so progress is something you can show, not only feel.

The takeaway

Start small and in the open: one senior designer inside a product team, research every two weeks that engineers and product managers actually watch, one fixed journey to point to. Add structure as the team grows: a UX lead first, then a hybrid model.