---
title: "Global Head of UX transforming Teradata’s product & design culture: chapter 4 of Kyle Ledbetter’s story"
description: "In 2015 Kyle Ledbetter joined Teradata in San Diego as a principal UX architect and rose to global head of design, revamping the entire product suite for Fortune 500 analytics. He stayed until 2021."
canonical_url: "https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#teradata"
last_updated: "2026-10-11"
llms_txt: "https://kyleledbetter.com/llms.txt"
---

> Markdown version of https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#teradata. Index of every agent-readable file on this site: https://kyleledbetter.com/llms.txt

# 4. Global Head of UX transforming Teradata’s product & design culture

Chapter 4 of 6 in the story of Kyle Ledbetter, co-founder and CTO of Dreambase.

- **Chapter:** 4 of 6, Teradata
- **Years:** 2015-2021
- **Place:** San Diego, California
- **Roles:** Principal UX architect at Teradata; Director, user experience at Teradata; Senior director, user experience, and global head of design at Teradata
- **Organizations:** [Teradata](https://www.teradata.com/)
- **Robot part on the 3D site:** right arm
- **Read on the web:** https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#teradata

In 2015 Kyle Ledbetter joined Teradata in San Diego as a principal UX architect and rose to global head of design, revamping the entire product suite for Fortune 500 analytics. He stayed until 2021.

In Kyle’s words:

I joined Teradata in San Diego in 2015 and stayed until 2021. The company had traditionally shipped hardware, with long release cycles, waterfall and thousands of engineers. By the time I left, I was its global head of design, and we’d revamped the entire product suite for Fortune 500 analytics.

I started as a principal UX architect on a small team that led the move to agile, software-only products. We created [Covalent](https://teradata.github.io/covalent/), an open source UI platform built on Angular and Material Design, used by Teradata and Fortune 500 customers. Our goal was speed to productivity, with functional UI in one sprint.

I moved up to director and then senior director of user experience. As senior director I reported to the C-suite and built a centralized global UX organization for a 10,000-person company, with research and design teams, UX labs and design studios. In 2018 we launched #OneUX to open the whole company up to UX. We also formalized our process as [R.A.D.A.R.](https://kyleledbetter.medium.com/r-a-d-a-r-ux-design-wrapped-with-architecture-research-f9a507e83f56), so every UX request was researched with real users, architected, usability tested and benchmarked.

For years, Teradata had built products for one persona, the DBA, and engineers took feature requests as requirements. We ran research with more than 500 customers from 150+ Fortune 1000 companies, cut 17 personas down to 6 and rebuilt them from real customers. Then we redesigned the entire Teradata Vantage product suite, from SQL editors and data catalogs to operations tools, and introduced dark mode.

In 2019 I presented the work in the [UX keynote](https://players.brightcove.net/pages/v1/index.html?accountId=1222253929001&playerId=default&videoId=6097709549001&mode=iframe) at Teradata Universe in Denver, for 2,000 customers in the room and thousands more streaming online. The most important result of those years was proving the ROI of UX: lower costs, less churn and faster time to market.

**Highlights**

- Global head of design, reporting to the C-suite
- Created Covalent, an open source Angular and Material Design UI platform
- Launched #OneUX in 2018 to open the whole company up to UX
- Redesigned the entire Teradata Vantage product suite
- Gave the UX keynote at Teradata Universe 2019, for 2,000 customers

**Numbers**

- **500+** customers in our research, from 150+ Fortune 1000 companies
- **17 to 6** personas, rebuilt from real customers
- **2,000** customers in the room for the 2019 Teradata Universe keynote

> “There is never enough research! Think of personas the same way you think about agile software. Always evolve, iterate and continuously improve.”
>
> Kyle, on the persona project at Teradata

**Related**

- Talk: [UX keynote at Teradata Universe](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#talk-teradata-universe-2019-keynote)
- Talk: [We Feel The Need, The Need For Speed](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#talk-ama-2019-need-for-speed)
- Talk: [Building Angular Material Enterprise Web Apps](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#talk-tech-people-podcast)
- Talk: [Building Enterprise Web Apps on Angular-Material](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#talk-ux-dev-summit-2016)
- Writing: [R.A.D.A.R.: UX Design Wrapped with Architecture & Research](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#writing-radar)
- Writing: [A Renewed Focus on User Experience at Teradata](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#writing-renewed-focus-on-ux-at-teradata)
- Writing: [Embracing the Darkness: Vantage Developer](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#writing-embracing-the-darkness)
- Writing: [Announcing Covalent: An Open-Source Angular 2.0 Material UI Platform by Teradata](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#writing-announcing-covalent)
- Writing: [9 reasons why we’re doubling down on Material Design for our enterprise web apps](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#writing-doubling-down-on-material-design)
- Project: [Teradata Vantage](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#project-teradata-vantage)
- Project: [Covalent](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#project-covalent)
- Project: [Teradata AppCenter](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#project-appcenter)
- Project: [Analytics dashboards](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#project-analytics-dashboards)
- Project: [Streaming data platform](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#project-streaming-data-platform)
- Practice: [UX R.A.D.A.R. process](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#practice-radar)
- Practice: [\#OneUX](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#practice-oneux)
- Practice: [The Persona Project](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#practice-persona-project)
- Practice: [UX toolkit](https://kyleledbetter.com/agent#practice-ux-toolkit)

On the 3D site this chapter is the robot’s right arm. Its popover reads: “Global head of design, revamping the entire product suite for Fortune 500 analytics.” Its panel reads: “From 2015 to 2021 I was at Teradata in San Diego, rising from UX architect to global head of design. We built Covalent, ran research with 500+ customers, cut 17 personas to 6 and revamped the entire product suite for Fortune 500 analytics.”

The full story:

**Covalent and the UI platform**

I joined Teradata in San Diego in 2015 as a principal UX architect. The company had traditionally shipped hardware, with long release cycles, waterfall and thousands of engineers. I was on a small team that led the move to agile, software-only products.

We had very few frontend developers and distributed offices, so we set up a matrixed team of frontend developers and designers across the product squads. We created Covalent, an open source UI platform built on Angular and Material Design, used by Teradata and Fortune 500 customers. Our goal was speed to productivity, with functional UI in one sprint.

I also led research and design for a real-time streaming data platform and delivered Teradata’s first developer experience: REST APIs and docs alongside monitoring.

**The developer platform**

As director of user experience I led the API and UI platform teams. We delivered enterprise single sign-on and identity, a SQL editor where developers could test queries and write scripts in the browser, an API catalog and developer.teradata.com. The UI team we built inside engineering laid the foundation for our UX organization.

**A global UX organization**

As senior director of user experience and global head of design, I reported to the C-suite and built a centralized global UX organization for a 10,000-person company, with research and design teams, UX labs and design studios. We aligned UX with product management, engineering, sales, support and marketing through the voice of the customer.

In 2018 we launched #OneUX to open the whole company up to UX, starting with a UX Summit and three back-to-back design thinking workshops for UX practitioners, product managers, architects, services and support. We formalized our process as R.A.D.A.R., so every UX request was researched with real users, architected, usability tested and benchmarked.

For years Teradata had built products for one persona, the DBA, and engineers took feature requests as requirements. We ran research with more than 500 customers from 150+ Fortune 1000 companies, cut 17 personas down to 6 and rebuilt them from real customers. Then we redesigned the entire Teradata Vantage product suite, from SQL editors and data catalogs to operations tools, and introduced dark mode.

**The keynote and the results**

In 2019 I presented the work, including dark mode and the launch of developer.teradata.com, in the UX keynote at Teradata Universe in Denver, for 2,000 customers in the room and thousands more streaming online. That year I also co-presented at the Art of Marketing conference in San Diego with Scott Robinson, CEO of Freshform, our UX research partner.

The major success of those years was proving the ROI of UX: lower costs, less churn and faster time to market. I stayed at Teradata until 2021.

- Previous chapter: [3\. Head of design for eBay’s technology team](https://kyleledbetter.com/story/ebay.md)
- Next chapter: [5\. Founding hire for the world’s first AI governance platform (Credo AI)](https://kyleledbetter.com/story/credo-ai.md)
- All chapters and facts: https://kyleledbetter.com/agent.md