Day 2 – Delivering at Scale: Making Traction with Resistant Partners
THD: 6th largest private company, 500K+ employees, #17 on the Fortune 500 list. Really good at deliveries, right? But…
Internal quick survey within UX team slack channel, n=38
10: never ordered, 10: deliveries have been great, 28: delivery was late or lost (almost two-thirds!)
Closely mirrors insights gathered by customer analytics teams.
A profitable company delivering a disjointed fulfillment experience for customers?
2017: Executive leadership allocates $1.2 billion over five years to create fastest, most efficient delivery in home improvement.
The Problem(s) —
- Unprecedented growth
- Nearly 75% in delivery volume due to COVID-19 in 2019-2020
- FOUR different supply chains
- Meaning: four different business teams, different channels and technology partners, and UX is in unique position to see all across
Tackling the Problem(s) —
- Build trust
- Gained traction
Building Trust
Investing in the team.
-
- Entirely backend — engineers and PM didn’t have good experience with UX
- UX: What do you have for me? Them: I don’t know, what do you have for us?
- Understand what it is there to do? Interviewed every single person in the team — engineer, PM, stakeholder, user
- Identified technology, context, and metrics; inform personal UX roadmap.
- Engineering team doesn’t understand why they are building what they are building
- Product / business teams don’t understand what engineers are building even after having context
- User impacts behind business asks
Gaining traction
- Moving from passive to resistant
- Set 1-1 meetings, push them out because of other urgent meetings
- Not invited in meetings where UX should be invited to
- They didn’t involve us, they didn’t need us.
- Involve leadership roles
- Communication types
- Alter communication depending how they work
- UXers like to ask a lot of questions, get clarifying answers
- Asking them questions meant not knowing about it, hence losing credibility fast
- Rephrasing the asking to telling: Tell me what you think if…
- Redefining Empathy
- Don’t be a kitchen sink of everyone else’s emotions; a mentality of us vs them
- It needs to be: all of us vs the problem
- Moving from problem-based empathy to solution-based empathy
- The Recipe:
- Stop spinning the Wheels: Tweak your own golf swing
- Think outside of workstreams: fixing sliced, silos thinking
- Involve partners
The payoff —
- A single source of truth
- Dedicated experience team
- UX (4), Product (2), Engineers (6)
- Engineers have context — whats and whys; asking better questions and taking technological decisions
- PMs look at UX to collaborate — on discovery
- Partners focusing on customer and associate experience