Building Cross-Team UX Alignment at Fisheries and Oceans Canada
Delivering a tailored UX bootcamp that strengthened collaboration, increased UX maturity and aligned product teams around shared practices.
Background: When Product Teams Don’t Share Common Language
The design and product teams at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) create the digital tools that help protect Canada’s waters and support sustainable growth in the marine sector.
When DFO reached out to Outwitly, they were looking to strengthen their human-centred approach — but they were running into a familiar reality across their project teams, product owners and IT partners. Everyone was approaching problems from different angles, using different vocabularies and prioritizing different outcomes.
To grow UX maturity across the organization, they needed training that could give all teams a shared foundation. The goal wasn’t just to upskill designers, but to help the broader organization understand how UX fits into their work and why it matters.
The sessions were engaging, tailored to our needs, and delivered with exceptional expertise. It was invaluable in helping leadership effectively collaborate with UX practitioners and has instilled confidence in our organization’s ability to drive user-centered innovation.
UX Manager, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada
Challenge: Aligning Teams Through UX Training
DFO’s UX leads were seeing gaps that made it hard for research and design to influence product work.
With targeted training, they hoped to address these gaps:
Different understandings of UX. There were different interpretations across teams of what best UX practices were, and how they should be integrated with product development.
UX and Agile not being fully integrated. Product and IT teams were moving quickly through sprint cycles, but UX wasn’t always looped in early enough to help influence direction.
Uncertainty about when to involve UX. Teams weren’t always sure when in a project to do research, when to bring designers into planning, or how to effectively apply research insights to implementation and iteration.
Design strategy not always leading to action. Because of these issues, any highly intentional design recommendations could easily be lost in translation when acted out across teams.
Approach: A Tailored UX Bootcamp for Cross-Functional Teams
Outwitly partnered with DFO to design and deliver a customized four-day UX Foundations Bootcamp for 30+ participants across Canada.
We ensured a highly effective, relevant program by:
Listening first, to understand their day-to-day. Before building anything, our coaches conducted listening tours with DFO’s design and product leads to understand their current processes, pain points and priorities so the training addressed real challenges, not just generic UX theory.
Co-designing a program that fit their context. The agenda, materials and activities were built collaboratively with DFO’s project team, to ensure that the program was tailored to their goals, workflows and organizational environment.
Offering instructors who are experienced UX leaders. Participants learned from people who do this work every day, with sessions covering:
• UX principles, roles and methods
• The business value and impact of UX
• When and how to integrate research into product cycles
• Collaboration techniques for cross-functional teams in Agile environments
Making the learning hands-on and inclusive. Interactive exercises helped product owners, IT leads and designers apply UX concepts to real working scenarios relevant to DFO, with the aim to bridge silos and build shared empathy for the end-users.
Results: Stronger UX Alignment, Clearer Decisions, Better Collaboration
By the end of the bootcamp, teams had more than new terminology — they had a common mindset for how UX fits into their daily work.
There were clear benefits already taking shape:
Collective UX maturity grew in practical, visible ways. Participants left with a clearer understanding of UX’s role in the product process — when to bring in designers and researchers, and how UX can help product development and serve organizational goals.
Cross-team silos started breaking down. The shared training experience created a foundation for better collaboration across departments. People who’d been working in parallel finally had a common language and understanding of how UX could support their projects.
Design leaders gained stronger support for their direction. The bootcamp reinforced the principles DFO’s internal design advocates had been championing and helped them build broader buy-in across product and IT teams, sparking new conversations about bringing UX practices into project planning at earlier stages.
Project stakeholders and UXers were poised to champion design. They took away practical tools to frame UX’s impact in business terms, strategically plan user research, and advocate for usability and accessibility. The training gave them clearer ways to bring design considerations into conversations and decisions.
Ready to create impact with the right team behind you?
We’re ready when you are.