Building a Value Discovery Squad

Context and the problem

Our design organisation had just been reorganised from regional teams into subfunctions built around specialised competencies. The subfunctions themselves were brand new, with no established ways of working yet, no shared history to draw on for how a request should move or who should own it. Requests arrived from everywhere in the company, but there was no shared way to see them as one picture, let alone evaluate them consistently. Anything unclear or ambiguous fell to whoever on the leadership team had bandwidth: meeting with requesters, running informal stakeholder interviews, piecing together enough context to make a decision.

Two things compounded each other:

• New demands were getting stuck in evaluation. The deeper discovery work — the kind that actually needs stakeholder interviews, not just a form — had no dedicated owner. It sat with whichever leader could find the time, which meant it often didn't get found.
• Info-gathering was inconsistent. Every leader ran discovery their own way, at their own depth, on their own timeline. Response quality depended entirely on who happened to pick up a request — and each subfunction had its own instincts about what mattered, with no shared standard tying them together.

The design: a squad, not a solo function

Rather than centralising discovery in one already-stretched role, I designed a two-tier structure that split the work by commitment level: a dedicated Lead who owned the process end-to-end, and a rotating pool of Members drawn from across the design competencies.

• The Lead is a near-full-time coordination role — senior enough to challenge stakeholders several levels up, and responsible for the health of the whole demand pipeline, not just individual tickets.
• Members rotate in on a quarterly basis at partial capacity, each bringing their own competency's point of view into stakeholder interviews. Assignments are paired wherever possible — matched by domain familiarity and requester location — so no one investigates a request alone.

Every new request moved through the same visible pipeline: logged centrally, triaged weekly, and — if it needed more than a form could capture — handed to a paired squad member for structured discovery, capped at four weeks before the squad had to make a call on whether it was worth continuing. Findings were scored against a shared framework spanning both value — user need, business impact, strategic fit — and risk — delivery risk, project risk — then presented back to the leadership team at a standing weekly meeting, so the people with the authority to accept or decline work were seeing consistent, comparable evidence, not whichever leader's notes happened to be most complete. Budget was deliberately not one of the criteria — the framework was built around a single question: where could design have the most impact?

Protecting the boundary between discovery and commitment

The most important design decision wasn't in the workflow diagram — it was a rule about what the squad was not allowed to do. Initial stakeholder meetings were for information-gathering only. No pledges, no informal agreements to take on the work, no matter how reasonable the request sounded in the room.

This mattered because the entire premise of the squad was to enable a considered, consistent assessment before any commitment was made. A single well-meaning "yes, we can probably help with that" in an early conversation would have quietly reintroduced the exact problem we were trying to remove: decisions made by whoever was in the room, not by a fair evaluation of the evidence.

• Meetings were always staffed by at least two squad members — never a leadership rep working alone with a stakeholder.
• The scoring questionnaire was intentionally never shared with requesters; it covered judgment calls that needed to stay internal to stay honest.
• Every request had to be scored — at minimum, enough to route it straight to "in progress" or decline it outright. There was no path that skipped evaluation entirely.
• A low score was treated as information for leadership, not a verdict — scoring below the pack didn't automatically mean a decline, only that the trade-off needed to be visible before anyone made the call.

How the process evolved

What held up from the pilot:

• Requests moved through one visible pipeline instead of scattering across chats, emails, and hallway conversations.
• Discovery work had an actual owner and a time box, instead of open-ended informal investigation.
• Leadership decisions were grounded in shared, comparable scoring, instead of whoever wrote the most persuasive summary.

What changed over the following two years:

• It became formally governed. Evaluation moved from a squad-run pilot to a tracked pipeline with defined stages and a documented service timeline — one that landed almost exactly on the four-week discovery cap the pilot had set going in.
• The scoring framework kept evolving. Within its first six months, one of its "fit" criteria was swapped out entirely once live cases showed it wasn't predicting anything useful.
• Its scope grew past discovery. A separate, smaller consultation function for lightweight design help was folded into the same pipeline in 2024, and intake gained a third possible outcome: a request could now be routed straight into a pod, not just accepted or declined — but only where one already existed to receive it.
• A metric we hadn't designed for showed up. Years in, financial performance became something management was measuring the design function against — a pressure the scoring framework had never been built to withstand.
• It ran into its own ceiling. A quarterly capacity-planning forum was drafted to plan ahead of demand instead of reacting to it request by request, but never made it past draft. The organisation didn't abandon that ambition — it answered the underlying question differently, through a separate operating model experiment elsewhere. This squad, and the centralised pipeline it ran, kept operating throughout, since ad hoc requests from parts of the company with no established relationship never stopped arriving. That's a different story.

Strategic takeaways

Go deeper

One field note follows a single thread further than a project page can: why the scoring framework was built around impact rather than budget, and what it meant when the organisation's own finances turned out to be a metric it had been measuring us against all along.

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