Here at PhotoStructure, Inc., there's a remarkable amount of access and harmony between the engineering staff, the UX and product team, customer support, and e

Here at PhotoStructure, Inc., there's a remarkable amount of access and harmony between the engineering staff, the UX and product team, customer support, and executive teams. It's like we're all thinking with one mind. In companies that are larger than 1, however, crossing team boundaries can be rough. UX and design teams can be either "embedded," where a design/UX person sits with a product/engineering team, or they can be kept all together. The first approach can be great at facilitating communication and iterating on something that results in something not obviously "designed by an engineer." The second approach, where all the designers sit together as a team, helps homogenize the overall UX esthetic across products, but their comments and input provided to engineering teams can come off as "drive-by critiques" that aren't always warmly taken. A great approach, if you can swing it, is to have the UX person "loaned" to your team for a couple days a week. Then that person has a chance to be "adopted" but the team, and not have as much default latent friction/discord due to being an "outsider."