Session Notes: A Seat at The Table: Making Your Team a Strategic Partner

— Today will share actionable ways to transition design teams from tactical resources to strategic partner
  • Based on my experience from working at Fortune 100 companies to early stage start-ups
  • Found that design is often used as tactical resource, as subsidiary of product
— Sometimes presented as peer to product and engineering, but often lip service
  • Excluded from planning and decision making, and if not viewed as player for realizing businesses strategy
    • Designers feel frustrated, get laid off first, and company is not utilizing resources

 

— Let’s start with a quick poll to grasp your collective work environments to place your company culture from tactical to strategic
  • Choose the option that is most typical for your company or organization, from option 1-5

 

— As you listen today, think how your company fits into continuum and you can ask questions in the Slack channel, and we will then provide a roadmap to try-out ideas with your team
  • It will help your company’s view of the design team, but don’t expect things to change overnight

 

— So let’s take a look  at the results
  • Most common culture is collaborating with product and engineering, but not being involed in strategic planning
— What I’ll talk about will be about moving up the continuum to higher level planning

 

— This is a very large topic, so I’ll cover most pertinent points
  • Measuring work
  • Organizing for partnership
  • Maintaining a business mindset

 

— Most important of three ideas is measurement
  • No measurement, no impact

 

— Make sure you have identified right metrics to measure
  • Already mapping design performance, but need to align metrics to business’s metrics
    • Metrics can be OKR, North Star, roadmap
  • But all metrics need to be at higher level than design work
    • Create granular metrics to connect design to high-level
— As you deliver outcomes, socialize impact of higher-level impact to organization

 

— Make sure your product development peers are partners in design process
  • Leverage design work to become their problem to make products more successful, and design around expensive problems rather than code through them
    • Make sure product and engineering have clear design partners

 

— Organize team in fractal structure so that every level of org has same leadership roles for PED at all levels of org
  • Design likely not existing as same-level of engineering

 

— What if we don’t have enough designers across each team?
  • Staff teams in order of importance of impact to company (i.e. new revenue, alignment with business strategy)
  • Establish consulting framework for teams that don’t have dedicated designers
— Amplify your design system to focus on content covering usage and how users behave
  • What type of interactions is a particular component best for?
  • Create a coaching or review process for the design system
    • Have a clear process for using components

 

— The third idea is the business mindset

 

— UX lives in intersection of design, business, and tech
  • So we need to be pragmatic, and reconcile user needs with business goals
    • Sometimes best design is the not best solution
  • Approach work like business person with design skills, so avoid saying no too much, and instead ask ‘why’?
    • Focus on problem to solve rather than specific solution
  • View product and dev partnerships as design practice
    • Ask: What are their goals, pressures they are facing?
    • How can you make their lives easier or better?
  • If you are seen as central to solving their problems, will be central to their work

 

— I’ll provide a case study with my work with Procore, which provides construction management tools for general contractors

 

— Design platforms broken into identiy, data, and flexibility competencies
  • All led by PED tripod, but defacto led by product team

 

— ProCore established north star metric of project activity, where more activity was key goal
  • Flexibility designed workflow tool to submit review and approve anything from drawings to invoices
— Challenge was to measure impact of design improvements on North Star

 

— So we looked at examples at other companies
  • All metrics applied to company context, and leading indicators were not trailing ones like revenue

 

— We also identified the goals the company focused on and ProCore was in productivity game. Goals can be:
  • Capturing and holding attention
  • Facilitating a transaction
  • Increasing productivity

 

— In the end, we refrenced the  Spotify metrics  for our design focusing on
  • Breadth: Number of listeners
  • Depth: Number of hours/session
  • Frequency: Numbers of sesisions/week

 

— Applied Spotify model to their context
  • HMW increase adoption across customers and projects
  • HMW reduce time to completion
  • HMW add new conditional rules to change according to  new conditionals
— This led to relevant KPIs being developed for the product

 

— All of these flowed up to team-level primary metric, of completing more than 70% of workflows in less than a week

 

— So ran workshops with product, design, engineering
  • Didn’t start with tool, but measured best and worst experiences
— Software built from earlier user research and journey mapping with the teams
  • Mapped out value and success events for users
    • This let us align what mattered to users
— Metrics based on user success movements, which caught the attention of product, as opposed to vanity metrics, which were interesting but unrelated to product success

 

— Implemented some metric tracking, but team need to ship stories and had little time for speculative work

 

— Sharing one of tools in workshops to implement KPI ideas
  • Breadth– How much adopted
  • Efficiency — Getting job done
  • Frequency — How often

 

— Results?
  • Clarified mushy process to something more specific
  • Connected user goals to business goals
  • PM understood value of design, and saw how focus on UX outcomes contributed to business
  • Most importantly, UX was brought in on future strategy and planning discussions

 

— To wrap up, I will underscore how you can have a seat at the table, not just for you and team, but for company
  • Start by measuring work if you want

 

— I’ve provided template to make journey from tactical to strategic and offered consulting services to guide team

 

— I’m also available to act as a fractional design leader

 

 

Q&A
  1. How can UX impact product culture where business metrics don’t align with beneficial user outcomes?
    1. Sometimes you have to do this, but try to find connection, and show how user disatisfaction impacts business metrics
      1. Often chooser  of software is not the user, but you can make case around efficiency and user satisfaction
      2. Need to find thread to tie user and business together
  1. How are analytics and data flow are involved in establishing dashboards?
    1. Used Amplitude on this, and separate from the data team, and were mining user data to find opportunities to create products and features
  1. For tripods do you strive for one-to-one ratio in discipline representation, or discipline empowerment?
    1. Effort made to create even alignment on leadership, but my team was product led
  1. Do you need to implement initiatives in order to measure them?
    1. Usually hard to get data from interactions that have been completed, and typically part of process and can look at outcomes from data to mine that for ideas if things are working or not
    2. Ideally the process will be iterative
      1. Usability test will serve as gateway drug for data gathered, and getting support
  1. Where does one find template link?
    1. LInk in conference materials. Ther is a Google Doc you can fill out and answer questions with things relevant and use that as your plan