Improving UX Efficiency
My Role: Process Lead and Relationship Building
Problem
One of my first goals as a manager was to identify any major gaps on our team and address those head on. The were two issue that stood out the most.
One being with the rapid growth of the company UX was being brought into the development cycle later and later, and sometimes not at all. PMs didn't quite know who the UX team was or how to engage. With everyone being remote, this added to the mysterious UX team.
Secondly, our own UX team was feeling stressed with last minute project overload. There never seemed to be enough time to work through a complete end-to-end design, which resulted in a very disjointed experience.
Project Goal
Improve the relationship with our PM partners. We wanted to be more involved with requirements, get involved earlier on throughout the development cycle. This would improve our efficiency process and the overall product experience.
How I Solved This
Education & Alignment
We needed to educate our partners on UX and align on our mission, vision, value, and strategy. Together, the mission, network, strategy, and vision define the strategic direction for a business. They provide the what, who, how, and why necessary to powerfully align action in complex organizations. We worked on defining these elements alongside PM.
UX Playbook
To build best-in-class products, UX needs to come together with PM and Engineering. We had some great examples of collaboration already happening, and the UX playbook was designed to capture those best practices for working together across each phase - requirements, design, and implementation. This helped capture a general agreement of process, priorities, and estimation of design work.
Enhanced Design Reviews
I bumped up the frequency of our team design reviews to 2X per week and encouraged each designer to present their work at every review. Showing incremental updates at each review allowed us to catch red flags early on, unblock designers, and increase designer velocity.
I also changed the review format in order to improve efficiency and make sure designers were getting the feedback they needed in a timely manner. This helped to move projects along at the necessary pace while gaining valuable insights to improve the experience from team members. Stress levels amongst the team improved dramatically!
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Outcomes
Making these three changes drastically improved our team's ability to deliver best in class user experiences for every prioritized project on the roadmap. With this little bit of extra effort, we aligned on goals and priorities, designed and iterated with speed, managed risks, and were able to WIN as a team!
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Now that we had a well oiled machine in progress, my next steps were to set the team up with a Jira board for estimating and tracking our work so that we could provide transparency, balance workloads, and keep each other accountable.