This is awesome, Tanner! Thanks for writing it.

One thing I think may be missing from this post is examples on what "include design early and often" and "leverage design for more than UI" looks like.

Some examples–like how design artifacts (like service blueprints, context maps and personas) can help non-design team members contextualize their problem and get to actionable solutions earlier–have helped me in the past make the case for involving designers early and often.

I've often seen how centralized design orgs can get caught in the trap of only getting called when there's "there's some UX to wireframe". Getting ahead of this perception early on in establishing a company's software development culture can do wonders for cross-discipline collaboration!