Nobody owned it. So I wrote who did.

Over two years, Digital Acceptance changed how it planned, documented, reviewed, and shipped work — new planning models, repository-based workflows, AI-assisted development, tighter partnerships between Product, Design, and Engineering. Delivery was evolving. Design's role in it wasn't.

Ask five teams who owned a design review, who signed off on a deviation, or what “done” meant for accessibility, and you'd get five different answers — not because anyone was careless, but because nothing had ever written the answer down. Quality depended on who happened to be in the room, not on a system anyone could point to.

I built a cross-functional RACI that named, for the first time, who was responsible for design reviews, who owned implementation decisions, how deviations got resolved, what triggered escalation, and who signed off before release — across Product, Design, Engineering, and Leadership. Alongside it, I aligned stakeholders on a set of operating principles that set shared expectations for collaboration and design quality, so the RACI wasn't just a chart nobody read.

The organization was moving to Git-based planning and specification-driven development. Rather than wait and adapt later, I audited the existing spec files and found design information scattered across notes, risks, and dependency sections — present, but effectively undiscoverable. I proposed a standardized Design section for every spec template, with design metadata in the front matter: ownership, status, requirements, dependencies, acceptance criteria. Design didn't get retrofitted into the new workflow. It was part of the workflow from the first template.

Frameworks don't hold on their own. I established a recurring triad — Product, Design, Engineering — as a standing forum to review priorities, surface risk, align on ownership, and resolve dependencies before they became blockers. It gave the RACI a pulse instead of leaving it as a document people referenced once and forgot.