Design Leadership

Education - Visibility - Advocation

  • Role

    UX Design Manager

  • Mission

    Increase the culture of design in my company through advocating and education and to empower the design team to establish boundaries and avenues of communication with PM and engineering.

  • Problem Statement

    When I arrived at the company, product was very siloed and lacked awareness about design and how it could improve the product. A lack of awareness of the design process paired with the inability to push back on unrealistic expectations lead to a lot of frustration from individual contributors.

  • Result

    I held instructional sessions on design fundamentals with both PM and engineering, regularly advocated for design resources and best practices, and established processes that allowed design to find their voice in the organization.

What's the situation?

Coming into any situation, my goal was to assess employee pain points and see what can be done to ease that pain.

I talked with the designers, PMs, engineers, marketing, and anyone else that had a connection to the design workflow. I encouraged transparency and listened attentively.

After many hours of discussion and conducting R&D, I started collaborating with product operations to make a game plan.

Synthesizing the Feedback

After gathering feedback from all of the relevant parties, I started synthesizing the data. I gathered all of the feedback and started asking myself these questions:

  • What were the common trends among the feedback?

  • What items were low hanging fruit?

  • What items would have the biggest impact?

After assessing the feedback through this lens, I identified the following items as being the biggest areas for improvement:

  • Lack of connection and understanding within the design team

  • Lack of understanding with cross-functional teams

  • Duplicated efforts from lack of organization and documentation

  • Ad hoc requests that led to over-burdened ICs

  • Wasted efforts from creating features that didn't perform well with customers

  • A lack of awareness of what the benefit of UX design is

So, what did we do to fix it?

  1. Bring people together in design stand ups and cross-functional meetings

  2. Create a design system

  3. Create a design ticketing process in Jira

  4. Educate the product org through lunch and learns

  5. Create a user research process to gather valuable data

The results

  • Improved communication and a culture of connection and transparency in the design organization

  • Coordinated design efforts and higher quality design work being created and executed within the product team

  • Improved visibility and tracking across our cross-functional teams

  • Improved understanding of what UX is and how to collaborate with UX Designers

  • A higher value placed on customer feedback and correctly gathering and synthesizing qualitative data

The challenges and solutions

  • The adoption of the new design processes took a while as people weren't used to integrating them into their workflow. Reinforcing the new processes and explaining why they would help eventually led to the processes being adopted.

  • Not everyone was on board with the proposed processes, so there was some pushback at first that eventually subsided with continued education efforts.