No team, no process, no playbook — just a blank slate
When March of Giants was established, there was no UX team, no established workflows, and no template to follow. The challenge was to build a UX discipline from first principles — simultaneously defining what UX would mean for this project, who would do it, and how it would connect to a nascent creative, technical, and production team still finding its footing.
Drawing from Siege, Extraction, and competitive research
Before defining the discipline, I grounded my approach in what I knew worked. My experience shipping Rainbow Six Siege and leading UX on Extraction gave me a clear picture of what AAA UX teams need at different production phases. I complemented this with research into how comparable studios structured their UX orgs for similar titles — mapping team compositions, workflows, and the common failure points when UX is bolted on rather than built in from the start.
Tenets, artifacts, and a deliberate hiring strategy
I began by establishing UX tenets — a set of guiding principles that defined the UX direction for the project and gave the team a shared design language from day one. From there I created two key foundational artifacts: a global game experience loop mapping the full player journey, and an exploratory scope map connecting UX surface areas to the game's systems. These artifacts became the connective tissue between the UX team and the creative, technical, and production teams. With the scope defined, I built a hiring strategy around a deliberate tic-toc cadence — alternating senior and junior hires to create mentorship binomes — and a focus on T-shaped talent to keep the team small and versatile during the conception phase.
A closed alpha that proved the vision — and triggered an acquisition
The discipline delivered. The team shipped a closed alpha to 5,800+ players over 8 days, achieving high player appreciation and 100% platform uptime with zero online feature defects across friends, party, and matchmaking systems. The alpha validated UX decisions across onboarding, core loop, and social features at scale. The results contributed to the studio's acquisition by Ubisoft — the clearest possible validation that the UX approach worked.