On paper, UX reviews are a no-brainer. Teams want feedback. Leaders want quality. Experts are willing to help. So why wasn’t it working?

What seemed like a simple ask—“let’s offer UX reviews to teams”—quickly exposed a mess of invisible complexity: unclear ownership, inconsistent experiences, too many ad hoc requests, and burned-out senior designers doing unrecognized labor. There was so much willingness to help and share knowledge, but not enough of a system or support to scale. So we decided to design it.

This is the case study of how we created an internal UX Review service, not just a process. Co-led by service design and design ops, we mapped the end-to-end journey—from request intake to reviewer matching to documentation and follow-up. We built shared definitions of success. We tackled coordination debt. And we designed for the system, not just the moment so we considered who participates, who decides, who benefits, and who sustains it.

The project became a love story between two disciplines (Service Design and DesignOps), between intention and implementation to navigate the ambiguous intersection of what the business needs, what designers say they want, and what actually helps everyone do better work. More than that, it challenged us to apply our design craft to ourselves. What does it mean to design services for designers? How do we balance flexibility and fairness in a knowledge org? And how do we turn a “nice to have” into a performance driver?