The situation
In early 2025 the UX practice at Aflac lost its director. The role sat open for five months while the company searched. The CTO asked me to help run the team during the search. For anything UX-related he came to me first.
On paper nothing about the org chart changed. The design manager, the research manager and I all reported to the CTO. I had no formal authority over either of them. What I had was the CTO's trust and a team that needed someone to hold it steady while the search played out.
So I led the way I have led before, through influence rather than title. It is a pattern I know well. My first management role came about the same way, when a director noticed I was already leading people who reported to someone else. Fifteen years later, at a larger scale and with more at stake, I was doing it again.
What follows is what that looked like over five months: the calls that worked, the ones I got wrong and what I would do differently now.
Helping the CTO understand what UX does
When I joined in January 2025 the team had recently moved under the CTO. He was new to us and we were new to him. At our OKR review that March he was direct about it. He looked at our goals and said they seemed reasonable but he did not really understand what this team did.
That is a hard thing to hear and a useful thing to know. A team whose executive cannot explain its purpose is a team that is easy to cut. So the three of us set out to fix it, and I organized the effort. I asked for the meetings. I led them. I coordinated what we wanted him to understand and made sure the design manager and the research manager had room to share their own perspectives rather than filtering everything through me.
This work started before the director left and continued through the vacancy. By the time the new director joined, the CTO had a working understanding of what UX contributed and why it mattered. The new director thanked the three of us for that groundwork.
A year later, in March 2026, the company went through a layoff. The UX team came through it intact. The director attributed that to the CTO understanding what the team was capable of, the understanding we had spent the previous year building. I cannot claim a straight line from those meetings to that outcome. But the team was not cut, and the person who would know credited the work we did.
Carrying the budget
Running the practice meant running its budget, and this was the clearest part of the director function I picked up. No title came with it. The work did.
I went through what we were spending and found money that wasn't doing anything. I killed a tool the team wasn't using that ran $40k a year. I found unused Salesforce license funds and returned them to the broader pool. I caught small things too, like $75 a month allocated for parking when no one was going on site. All told I identified and recovered $162k in misallocated and unused spend during those months.
Some of what I recovered went back into the team. People had been on Windows machines they disliked for years, so I put some of the recovered budget toward MacBooks. It was a small thing that mattered to people who had been asking for it for a long time.
I also started a search to replace our research tooling, built around securing a multiyear contract on more favorable terms for Aflac. The CTO asked me to hold the final selection until the new director was in seat, which was the right call. So I ran the evaluation during the vacancy, and when the time came the research manager and I made the choice, with the new director sitting in on the demos and reviewing the costs.
None of this is glamorous work. But a team whose budget is quietly leaking money is a team that looks expensive when someone goes looking for cuts. Finding $162k that wasn't working, and putting some of it toward people who needed better tools, was part of keeping the practice healthy while it had no permanent leader.
A hard call from the research manager
Early in the vacancy the research manager came to me about a performance issue on her team. She was weighing how far to escalate. She had less than a year of experience managing and this was the first time she had faced a decision like it.
I had no authority over her. We were peers who both reported to the CTO. What I had was her trust and a view she wanted a second opinion on. We talked it through more than once. My argument was that the response to a performance problem should match the outcome you actually want. Escalating early can foreclose options a more direct coaching conversation keeps open and it sends a signal that is hard to walk back. She decided to work with the person directly first. The situation was improving by the time the new director arrived, at which point it was no longer my role and I stepped back.
When respecting autonomy costs you a window
During the vacancy I made the case to the CTO for a senior researcher requisition. Research was carrying more than it could sustain and I argued the headcount was necessary. He approved it.
The role was the research manager's to fill. It was her first hire as a manager and she wanted to run the search herself. I offered to help. She wanted to own it, which was fair, so I stepped back and let her lead it. She ran a real search and got it down to two finalists, either of whom would have been a good fit.
Then the position was frozen. By the time the freeze came down the new director had joined, and he was the one who told us the role was gone. We had two strong candidates and nowhere to put them.
I don't fault the search. The freeze was outside our control and I had no specific reason to expect it. But I knew from experience elsewhere that a search can always be overtaken by a freeze, and that awareness was a signal I underweighted. It was my first year at Aflac so I didn't know the local patterns, and I let a first-time hiring manager set the pace on a search I knew could have a shorter window than it appeared. I wish I had pushed harder for speed. Getting to two finalists a few weeks sooner might have closed the hire before the freeze reached it. Might have. I can't know. But the instinct was mine to act on and I didn't act on it strongly enough.
Pulling the team off a project that wasn't going to work
One of the things on my plate during the vacancy was a project to build a single claims flow across our group insurance products. The designers had done the work. The problem was getting engineering to build it.
The engineering group on this project wouldn't follow the designs. Some of it was real technical constraint on the Salesforce platform. Some of it was politics. They were a difficult group to work with and we weren't the only team having that experience. Other teams across the company were getting the same cold shoulder.
I tried to negotiate first. I pushed to get them to take at least some of the design changes and we got nowhere. I escalated to the CTO so he understood what was happening, though there wasn't much anyone could do. This was the highest priority project in the company, which made it hard to argue for pulling resources on the grounds that one team wouldn't cooperate, and he was already hearing versions of the same complaint from other leaders. After that I pulled the designers off the project. It was too frustrating to keep spending their time on work that wasn't going to ship the way they'd designed it.
Research later found a way in through product rather than engineering and has been making progress on that path.
What I'd do differently: I left the designers on it too long. I was new to Aflac and used to pushing through bad situations, so my instinct was to keep trying. Protecting people from work that's grinding them down is part of the job and I was slower to do it than I should have been. Pulling them was the right call. I just should have made it sooner.
What the five months taught me
Leading through a vacancy without the title is a specific kind of work. You have no positional authority, so everything runs on trust and on showing up the same way every day. I kept the practice steady through the search. The team kept delivering and no programs fell behind. I got an executive to understand why UX mattered, and that understanding helped the team survive a layoff a year later. I found money that wasn't working and put it back toward people who needed better tools. And I was the person my colleagues came to when they hit a hard call.
The CTO asked me to hold this together rather than one of the longer-tenured managers because I had the management experience and the seniority for it. Over five months I learned I could carry that weight — the budget, the executive relationship, the hard people-calls — without the title that usually comes with it. That is the part I take forward.