Advisory | Thrive Dept.

Where the work tends to get stuck

Experience organizations rarely struggle in just one place. The friction usually appears between teams, decisions, and operating systems.

It may look like:

Strong teams, weak alignment
Cross-functional leaders are capable, but priorities, ownership, or expectations are not fully aligned.

Research without enough influence
Customer evidence exists, but it is disconnected from product direction, portfolio choices, or executive decision-making.

Growth without a clear operating model
The organization has expanded, reorganized, or matured, but roles, governance, and ways of working have not kept pace.

Design Systems without organizational traction
The system exists, but adoption, ownership, governance, or design and engineering partnership remains inconsistent.

Transformation without enough connective tissue
The organization is changing, but the work crosses too many functions for any one team to solve it alone.

These are not simply design problems. They are operating problems around experience.

What we help change

Thrive Department works across the organizational conditions that shape strong experience work.

That can include UX and CX operating models, research integration, organizational design, cross-functional alignment, governance, capability development, design system adoption, and broader transformation work.

The goal is not to introduce process for its own sake.

It is to create enough clarity around roles, decisions, evidence, and ways of working that the organization can operate more effectively.

How we engage

The right engagement depends on the problem.

Senior advisory
Experienced thought partnership for leaders working through consequential experience, organizational, or cross-functional decisions.

Strategic consulting
Focused work to diagnose a problem, establish direction, or design a practical path forward.

Fractional or interim leadership
Senior experience leadership during periods of transition, restructuring, growth, or capability development.

Transformation support
Hands-on advisory and leadership for work that crosses teams, functions, or organizational boundaries.

Engagements are shaped around the problem rather than forced into a standard package.

Experience at enterprise scale

Thrive Department is led by Stephanie Sansoucie, a senior UX and customer experience leader with more than 20 years of experience across research, strategy, design, innovation, organizational transformation, and enterprise leadership.

Her experience includes building and leading a multidisciplinary CX organization of roughly 50 people through five Senior Manager direct reports; leading UX research, design strategy, experience design, innovation, design operations, and voice of customer; and shaping experience strategy across an estimated $200 million technology portfolio.

She has built and scaled distributed design teams across the United States, Serbia, and India and worked across Product, Engineering, Technology, Operations, Marketing, Analytics, Strategy, Sales, and executive leadership.

Her work has included enterprise transformation, organizational growth, post-acquisition integration, B2B and consumer digital commerce, healthcare, and complex technology environments.

The common thread is experience work that depends on more than one function getting it right.

A practical point of view

The strongest organizations do not treat UX or CX as a layer added at the end.

They build the conditions for customer evidence, product decisions, technology, design, and business priorities to work together.

That requires more than methodology.

Strong experience organizations are built on clear ownership, credible evidence, effective cross-functional decision-making, and operating models that reflect how the organization actually works.

That is the work Thrive Department is built to support.

Start with the problem

If your organization is working through a consequential UX, CX, or experience-organization challenge, the first conversation is about understanding the situation.

What is changing? Where is the friction? What decisions are difficult? What is getting in the way?

From there, we can determine whether Thrive Department is the right fit to help.

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