The Holistic Product Journey: Redefining Design’s Role in Cross-Functional Teams

“There’s power in the making. You can control the conversation and bridge the communication gap by making.”

The Problem Is Not Talent, It’s Being Stuck

Christina Goldschmidt is redefining design’s Role at Warner Music Group, framing “being stuck” as the real enemy of product teams. Not lack of effort, not lack of smart people, but the absence of customer driven vision and insight-driven strategy that teams can actually use. She referenced the work of Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group, who have built a whole practice around helping teams get unstuck.

But Christina pushed on the uncomfortable subtext: if it were truly as easy as handing teams a clear vision and strategy, more organisations would do it. In reality, leaders are often told the answer is expensive outside support, frameworks, and consulting muscle.

Her hypothesis is more practical: design inside the organisation can step into that gap. Not by waiting for permission, but by earning trust through the work, shaping the direction, and making the future tangible enough for cross-functional teams to align.

A Startup Mentality Inside a Legacy Company

At Warner Music Group, Christina has been there for about a year and a half. The context is digital transformation, with a startup mentality inside a big legacy company. That combination matters. It creates urgency, but also opens space. New ways of working can take root because the old ways are no longer producing the speed or clarity the business needs.

Christina did not pretend she walked into Warner and was handed strategic influence. She described the job as assessment first: reading the room, understanding where the gaps are, and applying a design mindset not only to users, but to the company itself. The question becomes: how can I help the team, the peers, and the wider organisation deliver better outcomes?

Earn the Right Through the Work

Her first tactic is almost unfashionable in a world obsessed with “being strategic.” Christina put the work at the centre. If you want design to lead, you have to show you can deliver.

She told a defining story from her first month at Warner. She was asked to redesign the entire independent distribution system, a complex piece of software that handles metadata for music releases flowing to platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. She had not yet learned the music business. She had not yet built deep trust with her team. The timeline was one month.

What carried her through was confidence in process, not familiarity with the domain. She leaned into user learning, stakeholder learning, and cross-functional collaboration, using sprint-style methods to move fast. The team modernised the experience, solved major pain points, and shipped a visible win. Then they converted that momentum into a roadmap, tackling design debt progressively rather than letting it pile up.

The lesson was not “move fast at all costs.” It was that visible, value-driven delivery establishes credibility. And credibility buys you influence across the lifecycle.

Fill Gaps Without Making It About Territory

Christina’s second move is to fill gaps without getting trapped in role defensiveness. She described stepping in when product management capacity is missing, or when a technical conversation needs deeper engagement, rather than defaulting to “that’s not my job.”

This is where design leadership becomes organisational leadership. It is hard. Sometimes it requires long hours. But the payoff is real: you gain empathy for adjacent functions, build rapport with peers, and become a partner teams trust when things get messy. That trust is what later allows design to shape strategy, not just execution.

Drive Value Like the Business Does

Christina was blunt about one trap: designing for design’s sake. She urged designers to anchor their work in user needs and business value, and to understand the commercial context of their company. At a publicly traded organisation, she even recommended listening to earnings calls and knowing what the CEO is optimising for.

This is not about becoming a finance expert overnight. It is about translating business motivation into product clarity. When teams understand why the work matters, they make better trade-offs and move with more confidence.

Stakeholders: Find Allies and Change the Story

Christina’s approach to stakeholders is pragmatic. First, identify allies. At Warner, she found a strong partnership with a product operations or product solutions group that sits close to business partners and brings user focus to day-to-day work. That alliance expanded research capability, improved understanding of business needs, and increased credibility for design decisions.

Second, overcome past perceptions. In a legacy company, teams may carry scars from previous experiences with UX or tech. Christina described a pattern that works: start by delivering what stakeholders think they need, then use that trust to show what user-driven design can unlock beyond the original request. It is a gradual re-patterning of expectation, powered by outcomes, not persuasion.

Third, do not ask for permission. Christina’s point was that many stakeholders will stop what they do not yet understand. Progress comes from showing, early and in lower fidelity, so the organisation can react to something tangible.

Team Foundations: Operations, Trust, and Relentlessness

To lead across the product journey, Christina emphasised the unglamorous foundations. Operations enable scale and repeatability. Even better, she suggested lending operational capability to other teams. If you remove operational barriers for the wider org, you remove barriers for your team too, and you become known as the group that makes progress possible.

Culture matters just as much. Christina spoke about empowering teams through clear design values that are actually used, not filed away. Her teams reference principles in critique, and designers explicitly connect their decisions to those principles. That repetition makes alignment real.

She also described investing in a culture of critique where work can be shared at any stage without shame. When critique is safe, quality rises, and trust deepens.

Then there is the part many leaders avoid saying out loud: curating the team. The right people in the right roles matter. Excellence is not accidental, and leadership includes making hard, honest calls so the work can meet the bar.

Reframing Design Systems Into “Reusable Components”

One of Christina’s most practical stories was about language. When she arrived, she found resistance to designing systems. Under deadline pressure, people cut corners and treat consistency as optional.

Her move was relentless consistency paired with reframing. Her team continued to design with systems thinking, but shifted the language from “design systems” to “reusable components.” Suddenly, the concept sounded less like a design preference and more like an engineering and delivery advantage. The work did not change, but adoption did.

This was a theme throughout her talk: influence often comes from translating design intent into the language your partners already value.

The Strategic Paradox and the Power of Making

Christina named a paradox that many design leaders feel. Making can look tactical, and tactical work can be misread as “not strategic.” Her counterpoint was clear: making is often the most strategic thing you can do.

A prototype can collapse weeks of miscommunication into a shared understanding. A sizzle reel can make the “art of the possible” feel inevitable. The right visual can align stakeholders, engineers, and leadership faster than a perfect document ever will.

At Warner, visions and prototypes are treated as a secret weapon, not an optional flourish.

From Sprint to Product: Launching WMG Pulse

Christina brought the framework to life with a fresh case study: WMG Pulse, an app for artists and songwriters, launched in beta after less than six months. The work began with a short sprint in Los Angeles with label executives, producing early wires for how they wanted to communicate with artists. Designers iterated fast, on the fly, then expanded learning through further conversations with label heads and with artists and songwriters themselves.

From there, the team created a sizzle reel and prototypes to socialise the vision across the company, building alignment before delivery. Those same artefacts became the basis for decomposing the roadmap, clarifying what mattered now and what could come later. The result was speed with buy-in, not speed with chaos.

The Conditions That Made It Possible

Christina closed with a useful honesty. This work succeeded because the conditions were right: a mandate for change, new workflows still forming, and a leadership void where better practices could take root. In other words, the organisation was ready to be helped.

Her final message was not complicated. Do the work. Show over tell. Do not be afraid. If design wants a more strategic role, it has to lead across the journey, not just at the interface, and it has to make the future visible enough that the whole team can move together.

Want to watch the full talk?

You can find it here on UXDX: https://uxdx.com/session/the-holistic-product-journey-redefining-designs-role-in-cross-functional-teams1/

Or explore all the insights in the UXDX USA 2025 Post Show Report: https://uxdx.com/post-show-report