The designers I trust with the most complex briefs share one habit. They spend the opening days of a project reading the organisation before they read the brief. They work out what this team can absorb, what it can act on, what will land and what will sit in a folder regardless of quality. They do this before ideation. Sometimes, before they ask a single design question.

We call this reading the organisation. And it takes four diagnostic questions before Figma is opened.

The ones who skip this step are not worse designers. Often they are better at the craft and so that makes this harder to see.

Strong visual execution earns early praise. The feedback loop is immediate and feels like progress. Nothing in that signal tells you it is pointing in the wrong direction.

But approval in a design review and influence over what actually gets built are not the same thing. Most teams are too polite to say the work missed the moment. They praise it, note it for future reference and move on. The designer leaves the room thinking it went well.

They only find out much later, when the product ships, that their work gets partially used, quietly reduced or shelved for a future sprint that never comes.

It is usually not a design problem

When good work goes nowhere, our first instinct is to question the work. Should we refine the flows? Improve the fidelity? Perhaps present better?

The more I have watched this pattern, the more I am convinced the problem is almost never the quality of the design. It is the sequencing.

Sequencing, in design work, means understanding what the organisation is ready to receive and act on before deciding what to produce. The best method applied at the wrong moment is not rigorous—it is wasted.

We often look at constraints through the lens of budget, timeline and trade-offs. Those are real. But they are not what determines whether work lands.

The more consequential constraint I’ve seen is organisational readiness: what decisions are still live, who has the authority to act on findings, whether design has ever changed anything here before. That is what the order of design operations has to be built around, not the project plan.

This is what it looks like in practice

Part of working closely with in-house teams is that we get to observe how designers navigate the gap between what they are given and what they are set up to succeed with.

We worked with an in-house designer who was doing everything right. She received the requirements, hit the timeline and thought through the trade-offs. The solution was considered and beautifully executed. It was current, polished and genuinely impressive. The review was glowing.

And yet none of it made it into the final product.

The brief had given her enough room that she took it as a mandate to rethink the problem. So she did. What she did not know was that product and engineering had already aligned on a direction before the requirements reached her.

When her solution landed in the room, it was too ambitious for where the team was. They praised it, parked it for a future redesign that may or may not come, and shipped what the developers had already built. It was faster. It was good enough and it was already done.

Naming the gap

We call this gap design execution without organisational reading.

The trouble is design education teaches craft and method. It teaches designers to solve the problem in front of them. What it almost never teaches is how to read whether the organisation is ready to receive that solution. Whether the problem is still live, whether anyone has the authority to act on the answer, whether the conditions exist for the work to land at all.

That is a different skill entirely. Without it, the craft goes to waste.

It is also what sits underneath most design maturity gaps, where you have teams that are technically skilled but structurally misaligned with the organisations they are designing for.

What reading the organisation looks like in the first week

At Stampede, user-centred design sits at the core of what we do. Often we associate the word “user” with the end user, the people using the app or service. But there’s a more immediate user of our design work: the organisation itself. To be truly embracing user-centred design, we must serve this group first.

As such, meeting people in the organisation where they are, not where we think they should be, is not a compromise. It is the work.

That shift in thinking changes what we pay attention to in the first week of any project. The signals are the same whether you are an external or an in-house designer who has been at the company for three years.

If anything, I’d argue that being an in-house designer is harder. Familiarity makes it harder. When you already know a team, it’s too easy to go in with the assumption that you know what they are ready for.

Where do we begin navigating? We begin by asking targeted, strategic questions.

Here is the organisational terrain I encourage my designers to canvas in the first week of their project. It’s four questions and they cover: whether design has ever changed a decision here, who actually holds the authority to act, whether this is a discovery or execution project and what “design” means to the people who will use the output.

Let’s take a look at what each of them means.

1. Has design ever changed a decision here?

Not whether they have a design system. We’re asking whether past design thinking has visibly changed what the product became.

A team that says “we tried a different pattern for that flow and it didn’t perform” uses design as evidence. A team that says “we did a big redesign two years ago” and moves on is using it as a credential. Those are not the same thing.

2. Who actually has the authority to move this work forward?

Not who is in the kickoff room. In many Malaysian organisations, hierarchy shapes how decisions are communicated as much as how they are made. Disagreement with a senior leader rarely surfaces directly in a meeting but rather moves through other channels, later and quietly.

Here, the most senior person in the room will nod, stay quiet or say the work looks good. That doesn’t necessarily mean a decision has been made. The actual decision-maker is often a layer up and they may be absent from the brief and reviews and only visible when a direction gets quietly reversed after a presentation they were not in.

The answer to who has the authority is not always obvious and has to be inferred from who the room defers to when a direction is questioned, from whose silence carries more weight than anyone else’s words.

3. Is this a discovery project or an execution project?

Design can enter a project at very different points.

Sometimes it is upstream, where design is involved before the solution exists, helping shape what gets built and why.

Sometimes it is downstream and designers are brought in after the direction has been set, to design it well and make it real. Both are legitimate but not interchangeable.

Engineering-led teams, common in our market, often scope and estimate the solution before design is involved. By the time the brief reaches the designer, the upstream decisions have already been made, and often in conversations that happened weeks earlier. What remains is now a downstream ask: take this direction and make it work.

That is not a lesser role. But treating it as an open mandate when it is not will most likely backfire on good intentions and erode the team’s trust in design as a function.

4. What does “design” mean to the people who will act on it?

Within the Malaysian present context, when a team says they need a designer, they mean someone to produce screens that are clean, polished and on brand. That is a legitimate ask but it is not the only thing design can be.

The gap opens when a designer assumes they have been brought in to shape the problem. To run discovery, frame the brief, challenge the direction, while the team assumed they were getting someone to make the solution look good. Neither party states their assumption. In a high-context culture like ours, neither party will.

So ask them directly: when they say “design”, do they mean making it look good, making it work better or making the right thing in the first place?

Where does asking these questions lead us?

Together, these four questions give you a clear, precise picture of what this organisation is actually ready for and where design sits within it.

Design’s track record tells you whether design has influencing power here. Whether it has ever been the reason a direction changed, or whether it has only ever been the thing that made a decision look better after it was already made.

Whether the role is upstream or downstream tells you something about access. It is how close to the problem design is allowed to get before the solution starts forming without it. In most Malaysian organisations, this is not stated in the brief. By the time it reaches you, the direction has often already been set, very likely in conversations you were not part of. What looks like an open mandate may already have walls around it.

Those two questions provide you with a reading and an opening move to consider.

The grid

The grid maps two readings against each other.

• Design’s track record. This is the vertical axis. Has design influenced decisions here before, or is it still earning that standing? This tells you how much trust you are starting with, before you have produced a single thing.
• Design’s role. The horizontal axis. Has design been brought in upstream to shape the problem, or downstream to execute a direction already set? This tells you how much of the problem space is still open, and how much has already closed without you.

Together, they place you in one of four positions, each with a different opening move.

Top-left: upstream, design has changed decisions here
The rarest configuration. The team has a track record of acting on what design surfaces and you have been given genuine access to the problem. The risk here is not failure — it is wasting the position by playing it safe. Take the harder problem, not the safer brief.

Top-right: downstream, design has changed decisions here
The team trusts design but the direction was already set before you arrived. This is not a slight but simply where you are in this cycle. The mistake is spending energy trying to reopen a brief that was never meant to be reopened. Execute sharply and find the one decision still live to continue earning the trust.

Bottom-left: upstream, design has not changed decisions here
The most common configuration for designers entering a new organisation or team. The mandate looks open but the organisation has no muscle memory for acting on what design surfaces. Building up to a big reveal means your findings arrive after the decisions have already closed. The team will nod, note it for next time and move on. The antidote is to structure your work in batches. Share findings while decisions are still live and people can still act on them.

Bottom-right: downstream, design has not changed decisions here
You have a defined problem but no established credibility yet. The temptation is to overdeliver on the brief to prove worth. The more effective move is to make your reasoning visible alongside your output, how you got there, not just what you produced. That is what shifts the position over time.

What design means and who has the authority

The other two questions, what “design” means to the people acting on it, and who actually has the authority to move the work forward serve as your operating conditions. They don’t change your position on the grid but they determine how much friction stands between you and the opening move your position calls for.

For example, a designer in the right quadrant who cannot get the real decision-maker in the room, or whose definition of design doesn’t match the team’s, is working against resistance that the grid alone won’t show.

The grid tells you how to start, not how to stay. Position shifts as credibility builds and as the team’s appetite for design’s involvement grows. Misreading it in either direction is costly, so it helps to be honest about where you actually are rather than where you would like to be.

You may move with too much ambition where trust hasn’t been established, risk getting the work admired but ultimately shelved. On the other hand, moving too cautiously where the mandate is genuinely open would lead to the window closing before you’ve used it.

Like in chess, the question is not what the ideal move looks like. It is what move is available from where you are standing right now.

The opening move is a design decision

For designers trained to do thorough work, the best move may be counterintuitive to what you really want to do and the impact you want to make. Choosing a lighter scope often feels like settling.

The truth is, arguing for a bigger move before you have earned the standing is the most common mistake. It is also the most avoidable one.

The designers who moved the furthest in the organisations I have watched did not start with the most ambitious brief. They start with the piece of work that earns them enough trust. This then creates a shared language and wins to make the next move possible. They chose the move deliberately, not out of safety but because it was right for where the organisation was.

The right opening move is not the most thorough piece of work you could produce. It is the piece that shifts the organisation’s position. One that shows a sceptical PM what research actually surfaces, or gives engineers and designers a shared reference point for the first time.

Small work that shifts a position is worth more than ambitious work that lands nowhere.

The grid is not to limit what you do. Rather, it tells you what to do first.

What this means for how we develop designers

This habit of reading the organisation first is learned. Nobody arrives with it.

How quickly it develops depends on the environment around the designer. The leadership models, what managers enable and what product teams make visible. It is a shared responsibility and it looks different depending on where you sit.

If you are a designer The fastest way to develop this is to be in the room before you are asked to produce anything. The kickoff. The stakeholder introduction. The early conversations where nothing has been designed yet. That exposure starts as observation but must become active: forming your own read of the room, testing it against what emerges, adjusting before the brief hardens.

If you are a design leader The designers who develop this fastest are the ones you bring into those rooms deliberately. Not to present. To observe and to learn. This is the education many senior designers still need and rarely get. Without it, the only way to learn is from having work go nowhere enough times that you start asking different questions. That is a slower and more demoralising path than it needs to be. You can shorten it significantly.

If you are a product manager The designers who will serve you best are the ones who understand what your team is ready to act on before they design anything. You can accelerate this by being transparent early. Share with them what is already decided, who needs to be in the room and what success looks like to the people above you. That context is not a constraint on the design. It is what makes the design useful.

A designer who reads the room well and starts simply will outperform a designer who starts ambitiously in the wrong direction. Every time.

—

If this resonates and you are trying to work out what your design practice is ready for next, I would be glad to think it through with you. You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out to our team.

The post Good designers read the brief—great ones read the organisation appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Back in 2008, I was a Malaysian designer working across cultures and continents, riding the Web 2.0 wave, trying to figure out technology and nurture this seed of a studio called Stampede.

Discovering Naz, a fellow Malaysian designer navigating Silicon Valley, made me feel seen. Someone who understood that craft is its own reward. That seeking meaning in our work isn’t unusual.

Someone from here, who looked like me and was obsessed over things that seemed small to others but mattered deeply to us.

I later learned this was the power of representation. Being in similar places now, it’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly.

What started as dinner…

Like the best of things, none of this was planned. Two weeks before his visit, Naz got in touch so we could meet in KL. What started as dinner plans turned into a homecoming, a return to Malaysia and also to a community of practitioners who share his curiosity about craft and meaning.

“Back in 2000, there were maybe a handful of web designers in the world,” Naz reflected, talking about the early days when people built the internet because they were curious, not because there was money in it. “And then more recently, at Config, I saw thousands of designers at Moscone Centre and thought, wow, look how far our profession has come.”

Our Makers Circle format is borrowed from those old Parisian salons where intellectuals gathered and talked to each other late into the evening. There, there was intentionality, a choice for quiet conversation and a space created for thinking together.

UOB’s beautiful hall was perfect for this kind of discourse. It was spacious for deep conversations and elegant to honour the discourse. Our thanks to them for hosting us again.

Starting with intention

But the evening started with something you’d never see at a tech conference: silence.

Naz guided seventy practitioners through a brief meditation, asking us to let go of whatever had been eating at us all day. The whole hall was quiet, lights dimmed, eyes closed. We let go of the day’s scattered energy and entered the Circle with open hearts and minds.

I loved the renewed evening energy.

Naz’s Perspectives: philosophy, meets practice

Now whenever Naz and I talk, it somehow always comes back to craft. He’s the kind of friend you can pick up conversations with months later, exactly where you left off.

In fact, I learned the word “shokunin” from Naz. It’s this Japanese idea of master craftspeople who spend their entire lives perfecting one thing. Not just skill, but people who dedicate themselves completely to their craft, finding deep purpose in perfecting the smallest details.

Watching Naz share his Silicon Valley experience made it feel like thoughts and ideas were clicking into place. He talked about experiencing multiple booms and busts, his work at True Ventures and designing for inclusion. He shared how his team’s redesign of Adobe.com failed with Japanese audiences because it lacked that consideration for cultural diversity and understanding the culture and environment in which the design lives and breathes.

In the midst of figuring out what it actually means to make things when machines are getting better at making them too, these are the stories that stick with you. There’s tendency to gravitate towards success stories but mind the survivorship bias. Most times, it’s real failures that teach you something.

AI and the future of craft

We also touched on AI replacing designers. Naz shared a beautiful story about Bruce Swedien, the legendary sound engineer who worked with Michael Jackson.

Bruce was never afraid to share his knowledge. He taught workshops, wrote books and discussed his experiences openly. He’d share how he and MJ would tinker with mixes for hours, making over 90 different versions of “Billie Jean” alone.

When people asked if he was concerned others would copy the techniques he so generously shared, Bruce’s response was profound: nobody could replicate his creative future, just his past techniques.

Post-Circle, that was the bit that got me thinking. I was curious, so I Googled bruce up. Which led me to something he said that really resonates with designers navigating automation today.

Back in 2006, when digital sales were overtaking CDs, inexpensive hardware and software meant musicians could craft professional-level recordings from their bedrooms. Bruce saw this shift but far from being defensive, he was jubilant.

“What I find most promising now is that musicians have easy access to recording technology that is far better than at any time in the past. The music recording is going to be put back in the hands of people who truly love music for music’s sake.”

Replace “recording technology” with “AI tools” and his vision becomes rather prescient.

The shift to meaning

“There’s this rejection happening,” Naz said of senior designers globally who are walking away from big corporate jobs to do work that actually matters. “After Jason Santa Maria left Shopify and Ethan Marcotte left 18F, everyone’s doing their own thing again. We all want to do things that matter and practice our craft.”

The value hierarchy is shifting.

These are experienced practitioners who’ve seen how corporate pressures can dilute good work. They’re not rejecting profit. They’re rejecting the specific trade-offs that come with a scale-at-all-costs culture.

It reminds me of how my friend Ben Bowes at GovTech Singapore puts it perfectly: “Earlier in my career, I spent a lot of time in what I call the ‘more industry.’ Helping companies get people to buy more, watch more, consume more. After a while, it wore me down. I wanted my work to mean more than an uptick in shareholder value.”

This wasn’t some abstract philosophy. It lives in the choices we make.

The Salon Experiment: flipping the script

Naz and I then experimented with something we don’t often see at a tech event: a proper salon. Borrowing from those 18th-century Parisian gatherings where intellectuals debated ideas long into the evening, we turned the audience from passive listeners into the real stars of the show.

Naz moved around the audience, no longer the visiting expert but genuinely curious about what we’re building here. The role reversal was beautiful. He asked the questions and people responded with shared insights about Malaysian design that Silicon Valley rarely gets to hear.

“How many of you know each other here?” Quite a few hands went up—many had attended our larger Makers gatherings. But among them I spotted a good few newcomers too, joining our tight-knit community for the first time.

“What’s the actual state of things here? The real practitioner version?”

What happened next felt like watching trust build in real time. People opened up.

They shared design journeys, accomplishments, frustrations and the emergence of distinctly Malaysian design language thanks to #sapotlokal campaigns post-COVID.

We talked about layoffs and uncertainty, navigating pivots to entrepreneurship, ideas worth building and who to build them with.

So what did we figure out about being Malaysian

One trait many Malaysians share is humble underdoggedness. Humility is a virtue here, but it also creates a massive blind spot. We couldn’t see far into what makes us great and so it was doubly beautiful watching the non-Malaysians in the room remind us of our strengths.

“As an outsider working with Malaysians, I value your cultural insight,” someone said. “Malaysians are fantastic multicultural bridges. What you do so naturally—navigating between cultures with fluency and warmth—is truly a superpower.”

“Malaysians can code-switch effortlessly,” someone else said. “Put us anywhere, and we figure our way out.”

Naz, coming from his Silicon Valley perspective, backed this up: “Living between worlds develops empathy across cultures. That naturally leads to more inclusive design.”

The consensus is we’re not trying to be Western designers who happen to be Malaysian. We’re Malaysian designers whose cultural fluency creates value that others can’t replicate. We don’t have to choose between local and global. Our between-worlds position makes us perfect for this role.

Vulnerability and courage

Did our experiment work? Many times over. The salon format gave people permission to be vulnerable alongside being knowledgeable. Senior practitioners admitted knowledge gaps. Founders talked about fear. Designers share the dilemma of using AI to deepen their craft while risking being made obsolete by it.

“I think I’m missing foundational design knowledge and I want to do something about it,” one designer admitted, with the rest of the room nodding along.

I found this moment particularly moving because it takes courage to admit gaps when everyone expects you to have it all figured out. This was the great collective figuring-out. I enjoyed every bit of it.

How we think about technology and taste

One exchange that stays with me is how we talked about technology and taste. It felt refreshingly grounded instead of panicked or blindly optimistic. There’s a real desire for thoughtful integration here.

The unfortunate reality is that commercialism rewards speed above all else. Designers get praised for assembling interfaces quickly, for churning out converting designs fast. But this creates a trap. When automation arrives, the assemblers are the first to go. Along the way, taste gets lost.

If we look around us, the pattern is glaringly obvious. Websites look the same. Platforms sound the same. Design has become homogenous. Faster, yes. Better? Not always.

We’ve become dependent on pre-built components, reinforcing our role as assemblers rather than creators. We’ve optimised for efficiency at the cost of the very thing that makes our work human—distinctiveness and meaning.

Backstage, Naz talked about inspiration. Not those from Dribbble or Mobbin, where we recycle the same patterns endlessly. But from architecture, from nature, from other mediums and cultural traditions. Originality lives in the spaces between disciplines, where we still get to lean on our curiosity and algorithms haven’t yet flattened everything into sameness.

The irony is that designers who create from first principles often deliver better results faster. Not because they work slowly but because they tap into what makes people feel cared for. When something resonates deeply with users, it succeeds more quickly in the market.

This reminds me of how Sir Jony Ive put it beautifully in his Stripe talk:

“I really do believe that we have this ability to sense care. It’s easy in a service because you confront care, because you confront the person. When it’s vicarious, when it’s via an object, when it’s via a piece of software, it’s more complex. But I think you can sense carelessness. You know carelessness. And so, I think it’s reasonable to believe that you also know care, and you sense care.”

This explains why homogenous design feels hollow. It lacks human intention. When everything looks the same, it’s often because it was optimised for production speed rather than crafted with the person in mind. The result is faster assembly but lower differentiation and substance.

Speed of assembly isn’t the same as speed of success.

The family dimension

Perhaps the most moving moment came when Naz’s 75-year-old mother joined us. Like many Asian parents, she’s never quite understood what her son does with “these Internet things.” Neither does mine!

In Asian families, elders are woven into the fabric of our achievements. But in technology, our accomplishments often exist in languages our elders don’t speak. Watching Naz’s mother see her son command respectful attention from a room full of professionals transformed the evening from a professional gathering into a cultural homecoming.

Between Worlds: where we go from here

Like those early web designers Naz remembers, we’re approaching technology with curiosity rather than fear. We’re building for global markets but celebrating local culture.

Innovation’s future won’t be determined solely in Silicon Valley. It’s being shaped by practitioners who understand that meaningful progress happens between worlds—where Eastern wisdom guides Western technology, where community discourse creates competitive advantage.

This is our distinctive contribution: not choosing between tradition and innovation, but finding harmony between both.

For me, hosting is always a treat in itself. You plan the structure and then let the gathering take its own flow.

By evening’s end, something had shifted. We ran over by 30 minutes, yet nobody looked at their phone except for photos. This felt different.

As I watched Naz’s mother beam with pride, I dare say we’d created something unprecedented: a gathering that honours both individual craft excellence and collective cultural wisdom.

My team and I at Stampede feel deeply grateful we get to create this space for discourse. One Makers at a time, we’re building community that chooses craft over convenience, meaning over metrics, depth over noise.

The future belongs to those who remember that design is both craft and responsibility. We’re just getting started.

—

Next up: The conversation about craft and taste in the age of AI continues at Makers 12 on 27th September. Registration opens soon.

Special thanks to Naz Hamid, UOB Malaysia, my wonderful team at Stampede and every practitioner who made this gathering possible. – Shaza

The post Design, identity and the Malaysian way of seeing with Naz Hamid at Makers Circle appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

The handoff paradigm is failing us

At Stampede Makers X last month, we discovered something unsurprising yet just as disheartening: 51% of teams still operate in what we call the “Handoff stage”—where design creates specifications, transfers them to development and hopes (mostly prays) what emerges weeks or months later, still resembles their vision.

Stampede Makers isn’t your typical event. We created it to address the industry’s elephants in the room—persistent problems everyone experiences but few discuss openly.

For our tenth edition (the “X”), we tackled the design-development divide. Like past Makers events, we put a challenging question out into the world to see if others were just as bothered by it. They were—and they came in droves.

For the first time, we brought together equal numbers of designers and developers, all searching for better collaborative approaches. What emerged was a genuine conversation about breaking down the handoff model that has kept these disciplines working apart while supposedly working together.

The handoff model persists not because it works well, but because it’s the path of least resistance. When we observe teams operating this way, three patterns consistently emerge:

• Products require extensive rework when technical constraints surface too late
• Market opportunities slip away as competitors with more integrated teams move faster
• Users receive experiences that feel “almost right” – visually polished interfaces that don’t quite work or functional systems wrapped in confusing interactions

There is clearly inefficiency, and we’ve become good at normalising it.

But what if the handoff model is not only poorly practised? What if it’s fundamentally misaligned with how digital products should be created?

Why do we keep running this ineffective relay?

Now, if the handoff model creates so many problems, why does it persist?

The easy answer is inertia. We continue using it because we always have. Looking deeper, I realised something more interesting could be at the centre of this: the handoff model aligns with how specialists prefer to work and how organisations prefer to structure themselves.

This made sense in an earlier era. When digital experiences were simpler and user expectations lower, the gap between design intent and technical implementation didn’t matter as much.

That world no longer exists. Users now expect seamless experiences across multiple touchpoints. Technology has grown exponentially more complex. Speed to market increasingly determines winners.

We’re using a 2005 workflow model in 2025. This misalignment becomes more costly every year.

A developer’s perspective shift that changes everything

During Makers X, Stampede’s full-stack developer Syazwan Zubir described his first usability testing experience. He watched real users struggle with a government website that, from his developer’s perspective, was logically structured. Some users simply gave up in frustration.

“It was a wake-up call,” he admitted.

This observation reveals something profound. When developers directly witness users struggling with their creation, something fundamental shifts. The gap between building and using becomes visceral. The handoff model suddenly feels not just inefficient but absurd.

What’s fascinating is this shift doesn’t require developers to become designers. It simply requires them to expand their perspective to include the people using what they build.

Far from diluting technical excellence, we’re contextualising our solutions within human needs. Syazwan calls this “user-centred engineering“, a concept put forth by Addy Osmani, Google Chrome’s senior engineer.

Addy said, “A user’s experience is the ultimate measure of engineering success. Great engineers care deeply about the user and their needs – this includes sweating the details and making sure their experience is a valuable one.“

It does not mean abdicating your development responsibilities. It means maintaining your technical rigour while embracing empathy for the users.

Moving beyond the relay race

Our panel of cross-disciplinary experts revealed several patterns that transform the traditional handoff model:

Embrace your productive friction

Rather than avoiding tension between disciplines, Ikhwan reframed friction as creative energy – like hands creating warmth through friction. “Every meaningful problem needs this kind of productive tension,” he explained. “It’s where innovation happens.”

This perspective shift changes everything. What if friction between design and development isn’t something to eliminate but to harness? Alexis shared how her team’s most innovative solutions emerged precisely from challenging cross-team discussions that initially felt uncomfortable.

The practical application is surprisingly counterintuitive. Instead of smoothing over differences, successful teams create structured spaces for productive disagreement. Ikhwan’s Tower Defense Retrospectives from Tasty Cupcakes does exactly this—it gives teams a framework to visualise both their strengths and challenges without the conversation becoming personal.

Atif added that when development teams are confident enough to push back on design decisions with technical context and design teams are open enough to explain the reasoning behind their choices, the result is almost always a better solution than either discipline would have created alone.

Learning is best done through direct experience

The most powerful catalyst for change wasn’t process frameworks or tools but direct exposure to each other’s worlds. Designers who understand technical constraints create more implementable solutions. Developers who understand the “why” behind design decisions implement them more thoughtfully.

Syazwan’s journey exemplified this perfectly. His approach to building applications changed after watching real users struggle with an interface. In his own words, “I realised that logical code doesn’t matter if users can’t figure out how to use it.”

What’s striking is how this cross-disciplinary understanding develops. It doesn’t come from documentation or presentations. It emerges from shared experiences and direct observation. Alexis described how IKEA’s most effective teams regularly include developers in user research sessions and designers in technical architecture discussions – not to turn everyone into generalists but to build shared context.

Create artefacts that serve both worlds

All panellists emphasised the importance of shared artefacts that bridge disciplines. These aren’t just deliverables to be handed off but tools for ongoing collaboration.

Alexis shared how her team tackled this at an enterprise scale. When designers would look at implementation and say, “This isn’t what I designed,” the root cause wasn’t usually developer indifference. It was that collaboration had started too late. Her solution was a shared artefact—dependency maps between backend and frontend teams—that made complex systems visible to everyone, regardless of their technical background.

What makes these artefacts effective? They’re co-created rather than handed off. They make complex systems visible to everyone. And they focus on neutral territory rather than individual ownership.

Ikhwan expanded on this last point, recommending moving critique sessions away from individuals to the artefacts themselves – discussing “this user flow has friction points” instead of “your design doesn’t work.”

Several artefacts you could consider that worked particularly well as bridges:

• Component libraries with both design tokens and code implementation
• Journey maps annotated with both user needs and technical constraints
• Service blueprints that visualize both frontend and backend interactions
• Design systems built collaboratively by both disciplines

Communicate across boundaries

The classic question—”But I already told them that!”—resonated across all panelists’ experiences. Ikhwan’s practical “five channels five times” method addresses this reality. Important messages need to be communicated multiple times through different channels to penetrate domain boundaries.

Alexis noted that at IKEA’s scale, they discovered that documentation works best when it’s co-created, not handed off. “The process of creating it together is often more valuable than the document itself,” she explained. The document becomes a record of shared understanding rather than instructions from one team to another.

Atif also shared a simple but effective practice from his experience: regular “design+dev pairing” sessions where designers and developers sit together to work through implementation challenges in real time. These sessions build communication muscles and shared vocabulary that makes all other interactions more effective.

The Partnership Evolution

These insights helped us map a progression that teams typically follow:

Handoff: Sequential work with periodic transfers of ownership. This is where most teams begin and many remain.

Coordination: Working side-by-side with regular check-ins. Issues surface earlier, but disciplines maintain separate processes.

Integration: Shared ownership and combined practices. Team members develop cross-functional literacy and focus on collective impact.

Partnership: A unified culture with resilient practices that scale. Design and development flow together toward shared objectives.

What’s fascinating is how each stage delivers tangible improvements – faster delivery, better quality, less rework. But the most significant gains emerge at the partnership stage, where teams operate with an entirely different rhythm.

What if the endpoint isn’t better handoffs but their elimination?

Small changes, outsized impact

If your team operates in the handoff model, transformation won’t happen overnight. Evolution occurs in stages, each requiring different skills and mindsets.

Here are a few approaches to consider that would consistently produce results:

Put developers in front of users. Not through reports or recordings – have them directly observe usability testing. There’s no substitute for witnessing real people struggle with something you built.

Build an understanding of adjacent disciplines. Designers don’t need to become developers, and developers don’t need to become designers. But they do need enough fluency for meaningful conversations. Basic literacy in both domains transforms collaboration.

Create artefacts together. Journey maps, service blueprints, component libraries – these become powerful when both disciplines contribute to and use them regularly. They’re not just deliverables; they’re collaboration tools.

Share meaningful metrics. When design and development align around shared success metrics, they naturally coordinate their efforts. The metrics themselves become a common language.

None of this requires reorganizing your company or hiring rare multidisciplinary unicorns. It simply requires recognizing that these perspectives are complementary, not sequential.

Learning from our own experience

At Stampede, we’ve been fortunate to learn from 19 years of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Our founding team included both design and development perspectives – not from foresight about these challenges, but from necessity. This accidental advantage gave us insight into what works when these disciplines work closely together.

What’s striking is how consistently the same patterns emerge across organizations. The relay race creates identical friction points whether you’re a startup or an enterprise. And the solutions are surprisingly universal.

When we collaborate with clients, we don’t arrive with predetermined solutions. We start by understanding how their teams currently work. Sometimes we integrate design-aware developers into their team. Other times we add developers to design teams to validate ideas earlier. We’re not replacing workflows – we’re connecting disciplines within them.

Over time, clients experiencing this approach ask how to build this capability internally. This led us to develop workshops sharing practical techniques. We don’t have all the answers, but we’ve learned what tends to work, and we’re happy to share with teams ready for something different.

Evolving deliberately, not dramatically

If your team still operates in the handoff model, start with small steps:

• Invite a developer to your next user research session
• Schedule regular collaborative working sessions
• Create one shared metric that both teams contribute to

The changes don’t need to be dramatic to be effective. They need to be deliberate.

In the past, we could get away with handoffs. Today, they’re becoming a competitive disadvantage. The organisations that thrive going forward will be those that see design and development not as separate functions but as complementary perspectives on the same challenge: building things people actually want to use.

What if we stopped thinking about improving handoffs and started questioning whether we need them at all?

The community that makes it possible

What I found to be the most striking aspect of Makers X was the community itself.

UOB provided their thoughtfully designed space—creating an environment where candid conversations flourished naturally. The coffee that flowed throughout the day (courtesy of our dedicated barista) catalysed cross-disciplinary discussions that rarely happen in typical work contexts.

Behind the scenes, our organizing team—a mix of designers and developers—delivered the entire event without experiencing the handoff problems we discussed. There’s something particularly satisfying about embodying the principles you’re exploring.

A huge shoutout to our amazing volunteers—Faiq Uzair, Amir Ali, Sandra Yeoh, and Ahmad Alfhajri! Coming from diverse backgrounds as developers, designers and product managers, their dedication and collaboration were key in making this event successful. They truly embodied the spirit of cross-disciplinary teamwork!

Perhaps the most revealing observation is that over a hundred people dedicated a Saturday to examining how we might work differently. This suggests something important about our community—a shared recognition that our current approaches have limitations and a collective curiosity about alternatives.

Thoughtful questions, honest stories and willingness to reconsider established practices aren’t just personally valuable—they’re gradually shifting how our industry approaches these challenges.

See you at the next Makers 11, where we’ll continue exploring uncomfortable questions, sharing experiences, and yes, enjoying good coffee together!

Need better design-development collaboration? We help in two ways: through integrated project teams that deliver results while modeling better practices, or through practical training that builds this capability within your organisation. Both draw from real experience. Drop us a line to explore what makes sense for your team.

The post Rethinking the design and development relay race at Makers X appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Port operations in Southeast Asia offer a compelling window into this dynamic. As businesses of all sizes grapple with digital transformation, the lessons we’ve learned about building systems that grow with you—rather than hold you back—become increasingly relevant.

In our recent visit to Bintulu Port as part of the UTP research and innovation delegation, we’ve learned that as Bintulu Port positions itself as a leading Southeast Asia hub port, the focus isn’t just on infrastructure and technology but also on building the human capabilities to transform its complex operations and drive its future growth.

The evolution of port operations

Tucked along Sarawak’s coastline in East Malaysia, Bintulu Port moves over 50 million tonnes of cargo annually— numbers that barely capture the constant hum of activity that defines this vital artery of Southeast Asian trade. As the region’s largest export gateway for liquefied natural gas (LNG), the port doesn’t just handle cargo— it anchors Malaysia’s position in global energy markets and underpins regional economic stability.

On any given night, a 400-metre LNG carrier manoeuvres into the berth, guided by harbour pilots who’ve mastered the port’s unique conditions through years of experience. Under deck lights, crane operators orchestrate their machines with precision, their practised hands turning 40-tonne container moves into a seamless operation.

Step into the port’s control centre, and you’ll find the real complexity. Berth controllers juggle competing priorities: an incoming vessel needs emergency repairs, changing weather patterns threaten to delay scheduled departures and maintenance crews need a two-hour window for critical equipment checks.

Each decision ripples through a network of interdependencies—shift changes, equipment availability, tide conditions, and the ever-present pressure to maintain throughput without compromising safety protocols.

What makes Bintulu fascinating is its dual nature. While its LNG operations demand absolute precision and safety protocols, its growing container and bulk cargo operations require operational flexibility. Experienced operators seamlessly switch between these modes, drawing on deep institutional knowledge that no manual could fully capture.

Complex familiarity

If you’re a fellow operational excellence enthusiast like us, consider one such situation: A delayed vessel arrival cascades into berth reallocation decisions. Does one prioritise the smaller vessel that can complete operations quickly or maintain the slot for the larger vessel carrying time-sensitive cargo? Far from being theoretical exercises, these are real-time decisions that ripple across supply chains, made by professionals who’ve learned to read the rhythm of port operations like a second language.

Such patterns of complexity are familiar territory for us at Stampede. Working with organisations like Intel, PETRONAS and Chr Hansen, we’ve observed how sustainable transformation emerges when you enhance, rather than replace, human expertise with technology. Looking ahead, Bintulu’s evolution isn’t just about adding newer cranes or deeper berths. The real challenge lies in amplifying the capabilities of these skilled professionals—helping them better predict maintenance needs, optimise resource deployment and build resilience against increasingly volatile conditions.

For those who understand complex operations, Bintulu offers a masterclass in managing controlled chaos. It demonstrates how standard operating procedures must coexist with adaptive decision-making and how success depends on augmenting individual excellence with tools that help maintain precision at scale.

A future-ready approach to operations

To us, the future of operational excellence isn’t about implementing new technology. Rather, it’s creating an environment where teams can perform at their best, supported by tools that enhance their capabilities. In our experience, the most successful transformations start by understanding the rhythm of daily work—the actual flow of decisions, the informal networks that keep things moving and the practical ways teams solve problems.

This understanding shapes how Stampede thinks about industrial UX to enhance operations. Instead of disrupting workflows with rigid systems, we look for ways to augment existing expertise:

• When operational teams can easily connect information across systems, they naturally make better decisions.
• When supervisors can spot patterns across operations, they prevent issues before they emerge.
• When executives have clear visibility of performance patterns, they make more confident strategic choices.

But beyond that, what matters most is this: when digital systems are designed well, they grow stronger through use. They learn from how teams actually work, adapt to changing conditions and evolve with the organisation’s capabilities. This organic evolution ensures that digital tools support excellence rather than becoming another layer of complexity.

Building on proven experience

As UTP alumni, our recent engagement with the university’s research and innovation leadership at Bintulu Port crystallised a key insight from our nearly two decades of working with complex operational environments: true industrial transformation extends far beyond physical infrastructure and technological investments.

At its core, Bintulu Port’s journey to becoming a leading Southeast Asian maritime hub hinges on cultivating talent-readiness to help them navigate increasingly complex global logistics landscapes.

Take the Samalaju Industrial Port, part of the Bintulu Port ecosystem. We were received by the CEO, En. Sufri Hj. Bohari, who offered illuminating perspectives on port operations that immediately resonated with our core design and development philosophy—the belief that technology should not merely automate processes but fundamentally enhance human capability. Our conversation delved into critical challenges—from sedimentation management to customer cargo tracking and safety protocols—revealing compelling opportunities where human-centred design could transform operational efficiency.

The thoughtful conversations with Bintulu Port’s leadership team, including Group CFO Mdm Daiana Luna Suip, Senior General Manager of Project Delivery Tn. Hj. Baharin Osman, General Manager of IT & Digital En. Ramzi Shafiee and Senior Manager of Capability Department Pn. Haryanni Harun all revealed shared insights about the future of port operations. We explored how digital transformation could enhance operational visibility and strengthen their journey toward becoming a leading ASEAN hub port.

Turning research into real solutions

This is where our partnership with Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) becomes particularly compelling. Under Associate Professor Ts Dr. Mohd Fadzil Hassan, Deputy Vice Chancellor of its Research, Innovation & Commercialisation arm, UTP has built a strong reputation for excellence in engineering and technology, underpinned by cutting-edge research and industry partnerships.

Working alongside Associate Professor Ts. Dr Izzatdin Abdul Aziz, Institute Director of Emerging Digital Technologies, and Insyirah Hamid, Head of Business Analysis, we’re exploring how UTP’s research capabilities can combine with our experience in turning complex operational data into intuitive digital tools.

What makes this partnership powerful is its focus on practical applications. UTP excels at transforming academic breakthroughs into impactful commercial solutions. Their applied technology focus, combined with our experience in human-centred design and application development, creates a foundation for meaningful change in Malaysia’s maritime sector.

A different approach to complex operations

Our work with organisations like PETRONAS has helped us develop a distinctive approach to these challenges:

We start with decision-making—mapping how different teams actually make operational decisions and identifying where better information could improve outcomes. Our experience in research and implementation has taught us to build systems that enhance rather than replace human judgment.

We design for evolution from day one, prioritising not only today’s needs but ready to scale and adapt to tomorrow’s challenges. Our solutions grow stronger with actual use, capturing operational insights through built-in feedback loops that enable continuous adaptation without operational disruption.

Most importantly, we focus on capability-building. Complexity doesn’t have to hinder actions. Working in complex industries has taught us how to develop interfaces that make complex data actionable, helping teams spot patterns and opportunities quickly. We then build systems around them that evolve with growing operational sophistication.

This approach has led to concrete results. For instance, our work transforming capability development and talent-readiness at PETRONAS turned disconnected processes into an intelligent system driving strategic workforce decisions. Similar principles could help port operations create real-time visibility of performance patterns, enable predictive insights for better resource allocation and build adaptive systems that evolve with operational needs.

In another instance, our work in value chain optimisation transformed siloed departmental data into a dynamic, cross-functional intelligence system, which is now in use in PETRONAS boardrooms all the way to engineering floors. This solution not only enhanced operational transparency but also enabled predictive decision-making, allowing leadership to anticipate market shifts, optimise resource deployment and create more responsive operational and financial structures.

These experiences taught us that it’s never about the features. What we’re actually building are comprehensive competencies that enable teams to handle both today’s challenges and tomorrow’s innovations.

The power of proven solution

We’ve learned through experience that the most effective solutions often aren’t the most complicated ones. Having delivered mission-critical systems for the world’s leading organisations, we understand that effective solutions are the ones that:

• Deeply understand the day-to-day realities of operations and the people behind them
• Make innovation feel less like disruption and more like natural evolution
• Build capabilities that prepare people for tomorrow while enhancing their work today
• Create systems that grow stronger through actual use

Our human-centred design and development process, refined over hundreds of projects, ensures we deliver solutions that don’t just work technically but drive real organisational change. From executive dashboards that provide strategic oversight to operational tools that enhance daily performance, we create digital experiences that users actually want to engage with.

What comes next

As we continue our conversations with UTP and Bintulu Port, we’re excited about the possibilities ahead. The principles that guide our work with complex operations—starting with human understanding, designing for growth, and building systems that evolve—apply equally to organizations at every stage of their journey. Whether you’re a startup planning for scale or an enterprise pursuing innovation, thoughtful digital transformation creates the foundation for sustainable growth.

We’re looking forward to applying our experience in human-centred design, industrial UX and enterprise application development to create solutions that make a meaningful difference across Malaysia’s business landscape.

Because in our experience, the most rewarding transformations are those that not only solve today’s challenges but build capabilities for tomorrow’s opportunities.

—

If you’re thinking about how to build future-ready capabilities in your organisation, we’d love to hear your story. Reach out to studio@stampede-design.com

Shaza Hakim is a UTP alumnus and a co-founder and design leader at Stampede. With 19 years of experience and over 370 successful projects, Stampede specialises in turning complex operational challenges into intuitive digital solutions.

The post What Bintulu Port reveals about transforming complex operations in Southeast Asia appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

What’s fueling Malaysia’s design revolution?

When the team curated this long-due theme for Makers 9, its simple yet powerful message stuck with me. We are designing for Malaysia.

When I started my design journey, the job was making things look good and work well. The canvas was a Photoshop 1024×768 artboard. Today, our canvas is shaping the experiences of our nation. That’s the magnitude of transformation we’re seeing. From government services to businesses and non-profits, design is weaving itself into the very fabric of our lives.

It’s no longer a dream to see government services become genuinely user-friendly. And we could say this because we’re working with the Malaysian government to identify and remedy UX gaps in their digital services. Platforms like Schola are empowering students to explore career paths beyond typical routes. Small businesses, the “makcik and pakcik” shops we all know, are becoming digitally savvy thanks to platforms like Borong.

It was only apt that our theme celebrates Malaysia’s national month and how far we’ve come while reminding us of the work ahead. In his talk Malaysia on the Rise, Khailee Ng of 500 Startups said, Malaysians are not so used to good news. That may be true, but at the same time, we’ve been seeing a quiet revolution happening. Companies are stepping up to better serve their customers, while public agencies are making digital touchpoints more usable and accessible.

This shift is reshaping our nation, and we’re so excited to shine a light on it through Makers 9.

Design: the unsung hero in Malaysia’s glow-up

This transformation isn’t confined to traditional design roles. My own journey has strayed far from the conventional path—my recent work involved crafting a career progression framework, yet it’s still all about design. I see this same spirit in those around me. Our two incredible speakers at Makers 9 don’t carry the “designer” title but embody the essence of designing for Malaysia. Let’s take a look at how they do it.

Linda Rasip: Bringing empathy (and order) to chaos

I’ve known Linda Rasip since she first sought out Stampede for a Malaysian UX agency with global reach. Today, she’s the CTO and co-founder of Borong, a B2B eCommerce platform that empowers small businesses—the very backbone of Malaysia’s economy.

At Makers 9, Linda explained how her team tackled the problem of small businesses struggling to access suppliers in real time. “When designing for Malaysians, you need to anticipate their challenges before they do,” she said.

Borong owed its success in listening, adapting, and understanding Malaysia’s unique business culture. Here’s how they do it:

Empathy first
Linda’s team invests time in understanding local business norms and informal practices. They learn how shop owners manage inventory and understand trust systems in local supply chains so they can identify nuances that matter to Malaysian small businesses.

Build on familiarity
Borong doesn’t impose new processes on its customers. Instead, it complements the way the businesses already operate. This move creates a sense of familiarity, intuitive experience, and confidence, which all lead to trust and ultimately, sticky adoption.

Leverage omnichannel strategies
For seamless digital transformation, Borong ensures businesses can manage orders, update inventories and communicate consistently across various digital and physical touchpoints. This integration means businesses can maintain a cohesive operation, whether online, on social media or in-store.

Design for practical solutions
They introduced features like flexible credit terms and simplified supplier listings. These are real pain points discovered through research, and making them practical turns Borong into a reliable and easy-to-use solution.

When designing for Malaysia, Borong focused on building trust and leaned into cultural insights discovered through user research. To them, the work goes beyond bridging gaps. To be successful in Malaysia and other similar markets, the key is in building lasting relationships.

Yi Fen: Turning career confusion into curiosity and conversations

Then there’s Kong Yi Fen, Product Manager at Schola. Her team at Creador Foundation built a career exploration app to guide Malaysian students, but what happened next was unexpected—Schola went viral, not just among students but adults across the nation.

Everyone, from professionals to industry leaders, was taking career quizzes and sharing their results. (Mine was #budakperform, in case you’re curious.)

Yi Fen’s story began with a simple yet crucial act: listening. “We realized we weren’t asking the right questions,” she shared. Schola’s early days were marked by enthusiastic efforts to address too many problems at once. Through direct conversations with students, teachers, and communities, they narrowed their focus to one key gap: early career exposure. That shift, driven by genuine engagement, led to Schola’s success.

Here’s how Schola made it work:

User research to identify gaps
Yi Fen’s team conducted extensive research to uncover what students and communities truly needed. They listened to students, teachers, and parents closely. As a result, they were able to identify early career exposure as a key area lacking guidance. This insight shaped their product development, ensuring they addressed a real, pressing need.

Focus and adapt
After identifying this gap, the team narrowed their efforts to early career exposure. This focus allowed them to build targeted features, leading to more effective engagement. As a non-profit, this focus exercise allowed them to make the most out of the limited resources they had.

Make it fun and relatable
Schola didn’t just provide career quizzes—they infused local flavor into it! They used familiar slang, playful scenarios and Malaysian cultural references abundantly and this made career exploration feel more like a conversation than an assessment. You could see how it sparked curiosity across ages.

Break it down
Knowing students often hesitated to plan their futures, the app simplified career information into bite-sized, engaging content. Exploring career options is easier and less overwhelming now, and more students are engaging.

Accessible and inclusive to all
Schola’s mission is to make career planning resources free and accessible, reaching students in both urban and rural areas. A key factor in their success is the team’s diversity. With backgrounds in education, tech, finance, and social impact, they bring varied perspectives to the table. This helped them understand different user needs, making sure that the platform remains inclusive, relatable and relevant across demographics.

Schola is an experience that felt authentically Malaysian. But it did so much more than helping students. It sparked dialogue across generations, inspiring everyone to think about career paths with a different lens.

Where do we go from here?

What stood out to me during Makers 9 wasn’t just the impressive platforms or clever solutions. It was the optimism—the shared sense of hope for what design can achieve here.

We are a nation of talents, from tech innovators to local entrepreneurs, all united by the desire to make things better, clearer and more accessible. And every step forward counts.

We’re also on the cusp of something big. Design is no longer an afterthought. It’s now becoming the backbone of how we solve problems in Malaysia. Whether it’s transforming how students plan their futures or streamlining how businesses connect, design is driving real change.

Empathy is at the heart of driving Malaysia forward. We could do it by engaging directly with users—we listen, observe and understand their needs. We could use our local insights to craft solutions that truly resonate, and we build trust by anticipating their challenges.

Malaysians are highly collaborative by nature, so this part is natural but key for us. Partnering with developers, marketers and educators brings diverse perspectives, sparking innovation. We could focus on making our digital platforms simple and accessible so that they work for everyone. Then, we must share our insights and connect within our communities to amplify this impact so that together, we create a network that orients towards positive, lasting change.

Small steps. Big difference.

How do we play a part in this transformation?

Designing for Malaysia starts with understanding its unique blend of challenges and strengths.

This is a process that goes beyond how things look. We’re reaching deeper to address our people’s needs in ways that feel authentic and meaningful.

To do that, we must start by recognising what makes us unique.

The Malaysian flavour

Take Malaysia’s diversity. We’re a blend of cultures, languages, and traditions, each adding richness to our shared experience. This mix shapes how we interact, learn, and connect. It calls for design that is flexible, inclusive, and deeply attuned to these nuances, ensuring solutions that resonate across communities.

One key to designing digital platforms for Malaysia is supporting its multilingual culture. With Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and English speakers, robust multi-language features are essential for inclusivity.

Inclusive design also means understanding local nuances—catering to varied digital literacy with simple, clear interfaces and localised payment options.

Malaysian consumers are distinct in their digital behaviour, especially on mobile. Smartphones are the go-to device for browsing, shopping, and staying connected, so platforms need to be mobile-first. Convenience is key too—fast loading, intuitive navigation, and localised payment options like FPX and GrabPay make all the difference.

Trust plays a huge role here too. Clear privacy policies, secure transactions and visible customer support build confidence. Social proof matters too; user reviews and ratings often guide decisions, as Malaysians seek reassurance before purchasing.

Throughout Makers 9, we heard stories that proved how thoughtful design can lead to real change. Each speaker showed us the impact of listening, adapting, and building with empathy.

This is Design that connects—where every detail matters, and every choice makes a difference. It’s a reminder that when design is done right, it has the power to transform communities.

Building bridges, not only platforms

Makers 9 wouldn’t have been the same without the support of UOB. From the start, William, Sean and the entire UOB team turned their venue into more than just a space—it felt like Makers’ home for the day. We truly appreciate their hospitality and the care they took to make everything seamless.

We’ve had partners and friends from Seek, Setel, Mercedes Benz and Grab Digital Bank joining us too, exchanging insights and deepening connections. Conversations went beyond the usual, diving into how we can collaborate more meaningfully, understand their challenges, and build solutions together.

And to our volunteers—Sandra, Faiq, and Fatimah Aliaa—thank you. Your energy, kindness, and behind-the-scenes support made Makers 9 an extra special one for us.

A community is not an event, but a movement

Makers 9 felt like a reunion of dreamers, doers, and everyone in between. With over 100 attendees on a wet Saturday morning, we had an overflow of ideas and collaborations that didn’t just end when the UOB’s beautiful hall lights dimmed.

I’m certain that the seeds planted here will continue to grow and lead to more impact on our own home turf.

To all who attended, contributed, and shared their stories, terima kasih!

We’re not just designing for Malaysia—we’re designing Malaysia. Here’s to even bigger and better things at Makers 10.

Join us in designing Malaysia!

If you want to be part of the team that is designing Malaysia, we’re looking for specific people who can take us further! Come join our rank.

The post Malaysia’s quiet design revolution at Makers 9 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Stampede Makers is a quarterly event that celebrates the designers and builders in all of us. Run by the team at Stampede, it gathers those who are advancing their craft in design and technology to create better, more thoughtful worlds.

Makers 8 explores growing design maturity in organisations, or what we know as the big elephant in the room that rarely gets air time in Malaysia. Many thanks to our community partner, Setel, for opening their doors to over 170 people last Saturday. Everything from learning to ideas to coffee and seats was quite literally overflowing.

From the very first session, it was clear that this was not just another conference calling itself a meetup. Stampede Makers is a movement, a call to elevate design practices, and a celebration of the old-age wisdom of “if you must go far, go together.”

Stay here and join us as we recap the highlights and insights from Makers 8.

Keynote: Design maturity — investment or cost?

Hidayu Hakim, Stampede’s UX Lead, kicked off the session with a resoundingly relevant keynote about design maturity, how it manifests in organisations and the debate about whether it is an investment or cost.

“The impact of design is not found in design.”

In her talk, Hidayu takes attention away from design for aesthetics value to driving business outcomes and enhancing user satisfaction. Integrating design into strategic decision-making enables businesses to boost engagement, increase retention, and foster customer loyalty. A customer-obsessed approach also leads to operational efficiencies and market differentiation, proving design is a smart investment.

She also highlighted that achieving design maturity is an ongoing journey requiring continuous effort and organisational support. Design must be advocated and embedded at every level, embracing cross-functional collaboration so it can be set as the base for human-centred innovation. This approach must also align with strategic goals for design to be a serious driver towards sustainable growth and long-term competitiveness.

As a researcher curious about Malaysia’s design maturity, Hidayu conducted a live poll during her talk. It revealed diverse maturity levels across organisations, contrary to her expectations of a predominantly nascent stage.

While 37% of participants were “Curious about design,” recognising its importance but still in the early stages of design integration, 28% already viewed design as a strategic element driven from the top down.

Organisations in Malaysia are increasingly recognising that design maturity is not just about design; it’s an investment in business performance and innovation. The leadership is ready to embrace design more deeply, putting the ball in the designers’ court to lead the charge.

Panel: Breaking barriers to growing design maturity

Hidayu’s talk set the stage for an in-depth panel discussion at Makers 8. The panel brought together voices from design, business, and engineering to explore the benefits, barriers, and breakthroughs in growing design maturity across organisations of all sizes. Moderating this discussion was a pleasure, given the diverse and unique perspectives each panellist brought to the table.

Joining us was Ikhwan Nazaruddin, Technical Director at Aerodyne Group, who champions the integration of design maturity within technological frameworks, highlighting its significant benefits for product development.

On the business side, Mariam Parineh, founder and strategist of VivaValet, readily incorporates user-centred design into her business strategies but discovers she needs to cascade down this understanding and inspire action to the ground level.

We also had Leonor Cogneau, a global UX strategist and design leader who has driven UX vision and strategy across diverse industries.

Completing the panel was Riccardo Lavezzari, Principal Product Designer at SEEK, who has 15 years of experience advancing design maturity in multinational organisations with a focus on outcomes and steady navigation.

Together, the panel explores the benefits, barriers and breakthroughs in growing design maturity.

“Benefits that create long-term competitive advantage.”

At Makers 8, our panel illuminated the substantial benefits of growing design maturity within organisations. Ikhwan highlighted the importance of design artefacts like visualisations and user journeys in improving product stickiness, echoing Mariam’s point that UX research and usability tests help businesses avoid early mistakes and enable strategic pivots based on evidence.

To Mariam, usability consistently trumps trends. Understanding the customer—including their psychographic, environmental, and physical challenges—yields better results than following trends. For VivaValet, bringing insights from the research and exposing their product and development team to how older users interact with technology was a game changer for both the business and the product.

Leo observed that growing design maturity boosts team morale, with teams feeling more valued, confident and innovative with every product release. This aligns with Riccardo’s insight that design maturity enhances business growth, engineering efficiency, and time-to-market. Designing with customers provides a defensible long-term competitive advantage, reinforcing the company’s innovation stack and making it difficult for others to replicate.

“It’s a persistent, continuous journey.”

Despite the clear benefits, several barriers can impede the growth of design maturity. Ikhwan pointed out that in the frenzy of achieving targets, businesses could prioritise short-term deliverables over strategic improvements, leading to quick solutions like copying competitors or making shortcuts that become UX debt that increases the cost of service this debt over time.

This issue is compounded when designers themselves shy away from business conversations, as Ikhwan observed, and thus miss the opportunity to align their work with organisational goals. On the business side, Mariam added that when the business is ready to engage and experiment, designers often play it safe and seek permission before innovating, as they are trained to establish constraints before exploring possibilities.

On the ground, achieving design maturity is a continuous journey requiring persistent effort and strategic alignment, says Riccardo. His insight highlights the need for dedication and a long-term vision, as design maturity does not happen overnight but through sustained effort and collaboration across departments.

“Be brave and be bold.”

One thing we always do at Makers is scale the strategic heights but also wrap each session with actionable tips or experiments you could immediately try on Monday. The panelists were truly generous with their tips for achieving breakthroughs in design maturity. Here’s what they said.

No design culture? Build one!


If your organisation is exhibiting signs of low design maturity, Riccardo suggests flipping the situation into a chance to create a design culture from scratch. Making the design process visible and inclusive by involving cross-functional colleagues has successfully turned these peers into staunch allies.

Speak your stakeholders’ language

Ikhwan emphasises the importance of speaking the language of stakeholders. Data is the common ground for design, product, engineering, and business, and designers could use data, especially if gathered from mixed-method research, to bring clarity and confidence to the product development process.

Initiate without permission


Mariam and Leo urge designers to take the initiative without waiting for permission. So used to designing with constraints, the freedom to explore other possibilities and really stretch design capability may be debilitating to risk-averse designers who like to play it safe. Innovation lies outside the comfort zone, so go on-site, shadow people, conduct interviews, and even start a secret design system if needed, says Leo.

Ask for opportunities


Malaysians could be shy folks. If we’re not invited, we often assume it was by design. This is certainly not the case, says Ikhwan and Mariam. Managers and business stakeholders may not know that you want to contribute, so be bold and ask for opportunities. State your intent to create value and ask for the invitation. As Mariam quipped, “No business stakeholders in their right mind will not want their people to contribute in a big way to meet organisation goals”

Create lift for others


Leo also suggests finding design allies across the organisation. We could collaborate with engineers, operations staff, or PMs eager to build meaningful products. The success achieved together can inspire others to join the effort. One way to do this is by identifying your collaborator’s KPIs and finding ways you could help them move the needed through design.

Our massive thanks to Ikhwan, Mariam, Riccardo and Leo for lending their diverse voices to Makers 8. This cross-disciplinary discourse makes for real and candid conversations that set the right foundation for how we could all join hands and work together to grow design maturity.

Amplifying voices of Makers 8

Just like the panel, Makers’ audience is diverse in background, training, and expertise. Some travel from other states, and a few are Malaysian diaspora who visit home (and stay longer) to join us.

That creates an interesting congregation that never failed to surprise with their candid and forward-thinking responses. Designers, engineers, product managers, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and architects sit side by side, engaging, sharing thoughts and building connections that last beyond the event. We’re fortunate to have captured that spirit of Makers magic at Makers 8.

The start of a meaningful career

In every physical Makers, we help connect design talents with workplaces where they can thrive. Our Makers Job Board saw opportunities from Ernst & Young, SEEK, Maybank, Touch ‘n Go Digital, and many more companies.

Stampede is growing our team too so if you’re looking to join a team that designs and builds thoughtful future experiences, visit our Career page for job openings.

Love, thanks and see you at Makers 9!

Makers 8 wouldn’t have been possible without our incredible team’s hard work and dedication. From coordinating logistics to managing social media to planning the attendee experience, this has labour of love written all over it.

Thank you for being part of our community of designers and builders of the future! To creating better worlds together, and see you at Makers 9 in September!

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Stampede Makers is a quarterly event that celebrates the designers and builders in all of us. Run by the team at Stampede, it gathers those who are advancing their craft in design and technology to create better, more thoughtful worlds.

Makers 7 raised an important and timely question. As designers, our job has always been about solving problems creatively, but with data and AI, we’re stepping into a new reality where the boundaries of what we can achieve are expanding. Instead of getting bogged down by repetitive tasks, AI is helping us focus on what really matters—creating meaningful value and bringing innovation to the forefront.

Illuminating the way for us were three distinguished speakers from the fields of data science, design, and business, each offering unique perspectives on the integration of AI in design.

Dr. Lau Cher Han, Malaysia’s foremost expert in data science, is renowned for his human-first approach to technology. With extensive experience in AI and data-driven solutions, Dr. Lau has helped industries across the board harness AI to create meaningful, user-centred applications. His keynote explored how designers can leverage AI and data not only to diagnose problems but to foster innovation and design sustainable, human-focused solutions.

Pedro Custódio, Design Leader at EY Malaysia, is deeply engaged in UX and innovation, and a strong advocate for grassroots community initiatives. Pedro shared his insights on how AI is reshaping the role of designers, emphasizing the importance of human creativity in combination with AI’s capabilities. His perspective provided valuable direction for those seeking to enhance their design processes with AI.

As CEO of KATSANA, Syed Ahmad Fuqaha Sd Agil has led the integration of AI and data into telematics and mobility solutions. His focus on developing user-centric innovations, particularly in creating safer and more efficient transportation systems, offered a practical demonstration of how data is essential in designing impactful, real-world solutions.

If there’s ever a brain trust for designing human-centred AI in Malaysia, this is it.

A new era of design

During his keynote, Dr Lau shared how AI and data are opening new possibilities in design. To him, the key to successful technology is not the tech itself but understanding human psychology. “Psychology-driven solutions are always cheaper than technology-led solutions,” a powerful insight that underlines the importance of designing with human needs and behaviour in mind, not just relying on advanced tools.

Dr Lau took the audience through his journey of moving from the purely technical side of things to a user-centric design approach. He illustrated this with stories of everyday design decisions, such as why traditional Chinese teacups lack handles—they are easier to transport, cheaper to produce, and signal usability (if the cup is too hot to hold, it’s too hot to drink). These subtle considerations of user experience highlight how design can shape behaviour in ways that technology alone cannot.

He also shared that while AI can help automate repetitive tasks, such as generating proposals or analyzing large data sets, its real value lies in uncovering hidden insights—patterns that aren’t immediately visible to the human eye. This capability makes AI a powerful tool in user research, where it can sift through large amounts of qualitative data to provide more accurate and insightful feedback.

To him, AI is not about replacing human creativity or empathy but about enhancing it. While AI can assist with tasks like role-playing user personas or simulating usability tests, the human aspect—especially the emotional and empathetic connection—remains irreplaceable. He concluded that “AI can offer emotions, but only humans can give the full spectrum of empathy and emotional experiences.”

The shift from manual to meaningful work

A few years ago, we worked with a team of data scientists on an engineering app that reduced the time it took to predict equipment failures from two weeks to 15 minutes. Not only that, but it also recommended the best time window for balancing cost and risk. We expected some pushback from users, thinking they might feel their work was becoming obsolete.

Instead, they embraced it. Why? Because it took away the tedious parts of their job, freeing them up to create bigger value for the company.

This mirrors Pedro’s point on how AI isn’t about replacing our work. AI now allows us to enhance our ability to focus on more valuable tasks. As this liberates designers from mundane, repetitive work, it creates opportunities for us to channel our energy into solving higher-order problems that demand creativity and innovation. Pedro also noted how AI can give us a sense of empowerment—allowing us to accomplish more with the same or even fewer resources.

Designing the future, together

In the panel discussion, Pedro and Fuqaha shared real-world examples of how data and AI are transforming user-centred innovations. As a practising designer, Pedro brought home the point that while AI can enhance our capabilities, it’s crucial to understand its limitations and work alongside these systems—not against them. He advocated for effective collaboration between designers and AI, where we leverage AI’s strengths but retain creative control of our work. This balance, as he put it, is key to maintaining our value as designers in an AI-driven world.

Data and AI are not here to take over—they’re here to make us better, more focused designers who can deliver greater impact.

Looking ahead

Makers 7 showed us that designers today have an opportunity like never before. With data and AI integrated into our workflows, we can create more impactful, sustainable, and user-centred solutions. The future of design has never been about the tools—it’s about how we use them to understand, serve, and delight users in ways we never could before.

I am excited and optimistic about where design is heading and the designers’ role in it. How about you?

Thank you for being part of our community of designers and builders of the future. To creating better worlds together, and see you at Makers 8 in June!

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In November 2023, I was in London with our designers to attend design leadership and research conferences. We have several design clients in the UK, bp being one of them. We scheduled a visit to Douglas House, home to bp human experience design team (bphxd). Having worked with the bphxd leadership team for a few years, this was our first time meeting everyone in person and what lovely humans they are.

The humans behind the human experience design

We had the privilege of meeting Roger Rohatgi, VP and Global Head of Design at bp, whose strategy towards designing the future gave us traction to design better sustainable solutions for people and planet. There were Richard Fry and Hitesh Parmar, from bp DesignOps team, who are just utterly lovely people, inside and outside of MS Team.

We also had a lovely conversation with Christina Li from Design Integration, sharing how design sprints can deliver win-win results for both design process and product progress. We even ended up having an adhoc research roadshow workshop with Souleymane Camara, Head of Research and his team, exchanging ideas and our experiences in immersive research.

But above all, we had Barry Day to thank, for coordinating this visit and for just being a fantastic support to our team from day one.

Later during the week, I shared my lessons and reflections on my learner’s journey at BP Design Fuel, a monthly global streaming to bp designers everywhere. It was a lovely way to encapsulate the past two months’ journey inspired by the many considerations, conferences and connections I’m grateful to have been a part of.

Collaboration, not competition

🙌🏼 Camaraderie is one of our core values at Stampede, and seeing the lengths bphxd took to appreciate their design partners showed me this is what great, collaborative partnerships are capable of making.

Connecting with other design partners like The Brothers, Method and Zebra People also opened up opportunities for me to have an even bigger discourse over our current and future roles in designing for sustainability.

Thank you, Roger and the leadership team at bp hxd for creating this space for recognition, collaboration and learning. Thank you too to bp Malaysia team for being so welcoming and friendly to our mighty, can-do design team.

P/s: If you want to design the future too, we’re hiring!

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Throughout most of 2023, we’ve been curious about our role as designers and makers when the world needs us to go beyond the confines of our craft. This is us living in a house, one day looking at the ceiling and thinking “I wonder if it can go higher than that?”.

The ceiling is our perceived limit of roles and definition of design. The future will happen with or without designers; if we want to be an active part of it, we need to raise the ceiling.

In this edition, we look to extend these conversations from inside Stampede outward.

But first, the polls!

As participants started arriving, we wanted to take the temperature of the room, so Qi, the moderator, kicked things off with a quick poll.

We learned several interesting things about our fellow designers:

• People feel mostly hopeful and confident about their role as designers, but a few are worried.
• An overwhelming majority feel psychologically safe in their current team – fantastic sign!
• The majority who joined are beginners in design advocacy, which probably explains why the Design Advocacy breakout room garnered the most interest.

Asking Big Questions

In this talk, I shared my macro and micro reflections on the state of design in 2023. Here are a few big questions I had in my design journey.

On designing in the era of automation and AI

Are designers being made redundant by automation? For low-level pixel pushing function, or derivative design using components from a library that can be automated, perhaps. But it is also an invitation to look at how designers can influence the human-AI experience. To do this, we must cultivate future-ready designers who are explorer-builders, emboldened and trans-disciplinary, who dare to push forth the meaning of interface beyond screens.

We must also be responsible for our creation. We’ve been mostly thinking short-term in product validation. Assessment of the long-term hedonic value of designed experiences and occupational stress resulting from workplace digitalisation and automation must enter our vocabulary if we are to be proponents of inclusive design.

On design relevancy and value

All around us, designers are being advised that we need to prove our value. What is unique about design that we need to do so when other disciplines like engineering don’t? In answering this, I found that the problem with design is its value manifests not within the design team itself, but in other business-critical areas.

Consider that if the design does its job well, the value is not measured in the number of Figma components inserts or interfaces we generate. The value design brings is in how we improve product conversion, increase customer success and satisfaction, and improve the speed and consistency of interface implementation for developers. So the value of design is real and all-affecting, only not within our discipline itself and not always in the short term. But remove a designer today, and the cost of servicing the design debt will become overwhelming real quickly.

On design quality

Designers are often seen as sufferers of process pedanticism. We’re guilty of following closely our process and taking the time necessary to maintain the integrity and quality of our work, often at the expense of moving fast and breaking things. On the other hand, the process is instrumental in focusing well before speeding up so we can attack problems smarter and with cost-effective precision. Therefore, the design process and innovation progress are not at odds with each other but should co-exist.

On design leadership and being good human beings to each other

We designers over-extend empathy to our users, collaborators and stakeholders, but we often forget to use it with each other. As leaders, we spend so much time being the shit umbrella that we sometimes forget to sow and nurture the ground under us so people can thrive. Care is a positive workplace currency, but those who care most passionately are often the first to burn out. As leaders, we need to ask our people and ourselves how to become better support systems for each other.

The shift from learning to making opportunities

Makers are inherent learners, though sometimes we could fall into the trap of learning without actually doing it or waiting for opportunities to arrive without creating them.

Four of our designers shared their observations and reflections on the shift they had to make in 2023.

On design advocacy, Mai Sarah shared her experience inviting non-designers into usability testing and product ideation sessions. When design is open and made visible to others, we start seeing a proliferation of design enthusiasts and allies, as Azim found in WUC. His conversations with others in WUC not only led him to new collaborative ventures but also exposed him to the breadth and depth of the UX field.

Reflecting on Eric Snowden’s wisdom, the VP of Design at Adobe, we highlighted the importance of empathy towards our teammates, beyond our users. Recognizing empathy as a crucial element for creating a sense of safety, Adiel advocated for some ways to foster psychological safety within a team. These include practicing open communication, seeking feedback regularly, and placing trust in the capabilities of the team.

We also talked about building a future-proof team, Hidayu shared her key takeaways from the Design Leaders conference, emphasizing the need to shift the design conversation from solving issues to understanding the real problem first. Building a future-proof team also means we need to be inclusive of other disciplines, leveraging new perspectives to reach our common goal, and ultimately raising the ceiling of our profession.

The after-party experiment

Every online event feels unceremoniously cut short and awkward at the end. The host said bye. People turned on their webcam for a split second to wave to everyone. Everyone then tried to hit the Leave Meeting button while maintaining that awkward smile.

We have come a long way with online events, yet the solution to this sudden withdrawal remains elusive.

The topics we chose this time were big – each could be its own Makers theme. As we looked for ways to get people to delve, expand, and connect over them meaningfully, it became clearer that an experiment was in order.

We figured nothing beats genuine connection around a topic you’re passionate about. What happens if we create intentional spaces for people to connect deeper around things they care about? Can we do that remotely?

We launched five after-party conversations, discussing big themes like growing future-ready design teams, amplifying design value, psychological safety, and stretching our craft’s breadth and depth. Our design apprentices, from various non-design backgrounds, also hosted their conversations on fusing old craft and new.

Despite the initial tech hiccup (because of Murphy’s Law), people stayed long into the night, conversing and sharing their takes so that together, we could move the industry into the future.

This is the very spirit of Stampede Makers.

— A massive thank you to everyone who made Makers more special with every edition. If you want to join Makers #7 in February, likely in person, watch our social media posts.

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At Stampede, employees and apprentices enjoy our monthly mental health benefits. There’s always room to do better and be proactive with our wellness approach. Early this November, we organised an on-site mental health and resiliency workshop for everyone in Kuala Lumpur, as part of a 6-months long care program conducted by Humankind.my.

In planning this, Stephanie, our UX designer, worked closely with psychologists from HumanKind to tailor the program to our team’s unique background, career journey and challenges. Thank you for your labour of love, Steph!

Developing psychological flexibility

Throughout the two days, we learned to be still and observant towards our feelings when facing stress and to develop awareness of our fight/flight/freeze/fawn response to stressors.

Self-awareness is a recurring theme; developing it is a journey that takes individual willingness and accountability.

To lead others, you need to lead yourself first.”

Another hallmark session was how resiliency as a leader starts by tuning to your core values as you prepare yourself to lead others – something many future leaders in Stampede could relate to.

We also discussed psychological flexibility techniques that help us to work with others who don’t share the same values, a grossly underrated part of any professional relationship.

The sessions were laced with art activities, which is when the enthusiastic children in us emerged. From turning our worries into picturesque drawings to scrapbooking to communicate our values, it’s the most fun we’ve had with scissors, crayons and coloured pencils.

Many thanks to HumanKind for their excellent curation of content and the space they created in the two days for our team to connect at a psychological level.

What started as a workshop felt now like a team-building exercise, with plenty of safe moments to have honest and mind-nourishing conversations. To us, this is how we look out for each other and set a strong foundation for where we want to go next. 🚀

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