The Unblocker Award Finalists: Three Teams That Increased Cross-Functional Collaboration

The Unblocker Award is for teams that successfully removed organisational, structural, or process barriers that slow cross-functional collaboration down, and can show the difference it made. This year’s final three are:

• Delivery Hero - Cape Multibrand Design System: Connecting 10 Design Systems at Global Scale
• PLUS - Ending Redundant Work on a Rotating Design Team
• Heineken International - Unblocking Delivery Through Product Leadership Alignment

Each one solved a different kind of blocker: one tackled fragmentation across systems and brands, one reduced knowledge loss during team rotations, and one removed the delivery friction that was stopping a team from shipping predictably.
What connects these three is that they did not just improve one workflow. They changed the system around the work, and that is what made the difference.

Vote here: Take me to the LinkedIn Poll

Delivery Hero

Delivery Hero’s customer support and help center experiences had grown across a huge global ecosystem: 10 design systems, 35+ themes, 17 products, 5 service types, 9 brands, 25+ languages, and 70+ countries. That scale created a serious problem. Users saw inconsistent experiences when moving between a host app and support journeys, and internally, designers and engineers kept re-solving the same problems instead of building on shared foundations.

The team’s goal was to reach Level 2 of the Seamless Experience Scale across customer support and help center products. That meant creating a consistent visual and interaction foundation across products, with shared tokens for typography, colour, spacing, border radius, icons, and illustrations. Instead of debating consistency in abstract terms, the team created a clear framework that made progress measurable.

The biggest change was structural. They did not replace the existing design systems. Instead, they introduced the Cape Design System as a multibrand orchestration layer that connected them. That gave teams shared rules, shared priorities, and shared accountability, while still allowing local flexibility where needed.

The result was a move from Level 1 to Level 2 within 6–12 months, with the foundation now spanning 10 design systems and 35+ themes. That meant a more consistent, scalable, and usable experience for customers, and far less duplication for the teams building it.

PLUS

PLUS had a different kind of blocker. Its non-profit product team depended on around 15 part-time student designers, but those students rotated every 4–5 months. That meant knowledge kept disappearing. Every new cohort had to relearn the design system, product context, and team conventions, which slowed onboarding and created rework for developers too.

The team set a clear success criterion: cut onboarding from 4–6 weeks to under 2 weeks. They also wanted to reduce repeated AI context setup, improve design system health, and unblock adjacent roles like product managers and developers.
To solve this, they built plus-uno, a GitHub-native system that combines a component library, a prototyping workspace, and a structured knowledge base for AI-assisted design workflows. The important change was not just the tool itself, but the way knowledge now persists. Conventions, product context, and design decisions are stored in structured documents, then loaded automatically at the start of each session.

That changed the workflow from “rebuild context every time” to “start with shared knowledge already in place.” The impact was clear: onboarding time dropped from 4–6 weeks to within 1 week for new designers, design system coverage improved, and two product managers were able to handle minor design tweaks that used to be routed through designers.

Heineken International

Heineken International’s team was struggling with delivery predictability. On average, they were completing only 47% of their sprint commitment, and work was often started but not finished. The problem was not team capability. It was a system problem: unclear priorities, weak backlog structure, missing review loops, and conflicting signals from different stakeholders.

The team set out to increase delivery predictability, protect sprint execution, improve backlog quality, restore stakeholder reviews, and onboard new team members without losing momentum. They also needed to keep the team stable during a wider company reorganisation, which added more pressure.

The fix was not a local process tweak. The team changed how work was owned and managed. They introduced strategic alignment, a single voice on priorities, better backlog templates, protected sprint commitments, consistent reviews, and stronger onboarding. In other words, they removed the blockers around the team rather than asking the team to work harder inside the same broken system.

The result was a jump from 47% delivery predictability to 100% of sprint commitment within about 3–4 months. That happened even while the team was going through turnover and organisational uncertainty, which makes the improvement even more telling.

Why these three matter

These finalists show that the best way to unblock a team is not always to add more process. Sometimes it is to create shared standards, preserve knowledge properly, or fix the decision-making system around delivery.

They also show that barriers can look very different. One is fragmentation across products and markets. One is knowledge loss during team rotation. One is delivery friction caused by misalignment and weak structure. But in each case, the team removed the thing that was slowing everyone down.

The public vote counts for 25% of the final score, and now it’s over to you. The winners will be announced live on stage at UXDX EMEA 2026 in Berlin, where we’ll celebrate the teams turning evidence, research, and design into measurable outcomes.

Voting closes in 7 days, so make sure your vote is counted. Vote here: Take me to the LinkedIn Poll

*Get your tickets here to see the winners live: https://uxdx.com/berlin/2026/tickets/