Notabli, a start-up that is helping parents automatically organize and privately share their kids' childhood, needed to rapidly expand its product capabilities to include a fully-featured web app and more mobile app features. When I joined as a part-time UX Designer, there was not quite enough design process, UX knowledge, or collaboration between design and development teams. I was there to help. I was the Team Glue.
One important result of my working with this group of fun folks was better communication with developers, which means fewer questions, less QA, and increased collaboration. The team now prototypes extensively and writes detailed user stories, and the designers spend lots of time co-working with devs. It's beautiful.
Though I am no longer working with my friends at Notabli, I hear that my spirit takes over the bodies of my former co-workers and causes them to diagram on whiteboards. And write very clear specs. And perhaps even demand validation for product ideas.