Building a UX Team & Redesigning a Global Dental Website

Dentsply Sirona is the world's largest manufacturer of professional dental equipment and supplies, serving dentists, dental labs, and healthcare institutions globally. Despite the scale of the business, the company's digital experience and internal UX function were underdeveloped relative to industry expectations.

I was brought in on contract to address two immediate needs: build a functioning UX team and drive a website redesign that had been stalled without proper design leadership.

Key gaps on arrival

• No in-house UX team; design work had been handled by external contractors with inconsistent quality and no institutional knowledge
• No defined UX intake process; project requests arrived ad hoc, with unclear scope, competing priorities, and misaligned expectations between teams
• The website redesign project had cross-functional stakeholders from Product Management, Marketing, and Development who were misaligned on scope and priorities
• No design system or shared component library existed

The first priority was building the team. I led the full hiring process for three UX Designers, defining job requirements, screening portfolios, running design exercises, conducting interviews, and onboarding new hires into the team and company culture.

Hiring criteria

• Strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design process, not just polished deliverables
• Experience working with cross-functional teams (not just other designers)
• Comfort with ambiguity; the team was new, the process was being built, and flexibility was essential
• Healthcare or regulated-industry experience was a plus given the domain complexity

Onboarding the team

Once hired, I structured an onboarding that went beyond company logistics. Each designer was paired with stakeholders in Product, Marketing, and Development to understand the business context before touching any design work. I believe good UX requires deep domain knowledge, and getting that context early prevents misaligned designs later.

I established regular design critiques, a shared file structure and naming convention, and clear ownership of project areas across the team.

Before the team could do good work, we needed a system to manage incoming work. Without a formal intake process, UX requests arrived as Slack messages, hallway conversations, and last-minute additions to dev sprints, all with assumed urgency and undefined scope.

Problems with the old approach

• Teams had unrealistic expectations about turnaround time, assuming UX was a same-day task rather than a research-and-iteration process
• Requests often arrived after key decisions had already been made, limiting UX influence on outcomes
• No visibility across the team into who was working on what, or how much capacity remained
• Marketing, Product, and Dev each had different mental models of what "UX" meant and produced

The new intake process

I designed and implemented a structured intake form and triage workflow. Every request came through a single channel, was evaluated against a defined criteria set, and was assigned a priority level and timeline before work began. This gave stakeholders visibility into the pipeline and gave the team control over its workload.

• Standardized intake form capturing: project goal, user impact, business priority, deadline, and success metrics
• Weekly triage meeting with Product and Marketing stakeholders to review and prioritize incoming requests
• Clear service level agreements: discovery requests (2-week minimum), visual design (1-week minimum), QA review (3-day turnaround)
• Visible project board giving all stakeholders real-time view of UX team capacity and project status

The website redesign was the highest-visibility project during my tenure. Dentsply Sirona's digital presence needed to better reflect the company's market leadership and serve the specific needs of dental professionals, a highly technical audience with specific information requirements.

Stakeholder alignment first

With cross-functional stakeholders from Product Management, Marketing, and Development all having strong opinions and competing priorities, my first task was alignment, not design. I ran a series of structured workshops to surface assumptions, agree on user priorities, and establish a shared vision before any wireframes were drawn.

• Stakeholder interviews to surface each team's goals, concerns, and definitions of success
• Journey mapping to align on the dental professional's path from awareness to purchase
• Content audit to identify what was working, what was outdated, and what was missing
• Competitive analysis across dental industry leaders and B2B e-commerce benchmarks

Design approach

With alignment established, my team designed a new information architecture that organized the site around the dental professional's primary tasks (finding products, accessing clinical resources, and managing orders) rather than around the company's internal organizational structure.

Visual design emphasized trust signals appropriate for a regulated healthcare context: clean, clinical aesthetics, clear product specifications, and accessible typography meeting WCAG AA standards throughout.

Before & after

Cross-functional delivery

I managed the design handoff process with the Development team, creating detailed component specifications, interaction documentation, and a systematic review process to ensure implementation matched design intent. Regular design reviews during development caught deviations early before they were costly to fix.

Alongside the redesign, my team built Dentsply Sirona's first shared design system, establishing a consistent visual language across web, mobile, and future digital surfaces. Starting with a color token architecture grounded in the DS brand, we documented typography, components, and navigation patterns to support consistent implementation across design and engineering.

In a compressed engagement, I transformed Dentsply Sirona's design function from an ad-hoc contractor model to a structured, process-driven in-house team.

• Hired, onboarded, and developed a team of three UX Designers from zero
• Established a formal UX intake process that improved communication and managed stakeholder expectations across Product, Marketing, and Development
• Led website redesign through discovery, IA, wireframes, visual design, and development handoff
• Created a shared design component library to support consistent future design work
• Built stakeholder trust in UX as a strategic function, not a production service