Ux Team Development Strategy
Outcome
In my first year as a manager I transformed the UX team from task executors to experience advisors
With determination, I provided the team with tools, software, education, and a long-term vision. This turnaround improved morale and showed our stakeholders that we want to partner with them to craft an incredible web experience that drives leads and revenue.
By the end of 2021 I had:
Introduced standard UX/UI tools: research, analytics, stakeholder interviews, personas, competitive analysis, wireframes, hi-fidelity mockups, and prototypes
Trained them in analytics software: Google Analytics and Hotjar
Established communication guidelines: Diplomacy, empathy, collaboration, design thinking, and persuasion
Certified the team in UX Design: Nielsen Norman Group UX conference + certifications
Outlined my UX vision: Provided the team with a clear vision including our identity, how we collaborate with stakeholders, and the kind of work we will do moving forward.
Boosted morale: With these new opportunities, the team began to enjoy and take pride in their work, see the value in their unique skills and talents, and feel confident in cross-functional collaboration.
Strategy & PLAN
Flip the UX team’s identity and transform them into confident, trusted business partners and customer advocates.
My strategy was to reshape my team's mindset and utilize our talents to advocate for the customer. To maximize our business impact, we had to gain the trust of our stakeholders, establish ourselves as UX experts, and begin steering the direction of the web experience.
My plan:
Share a long-term vision for the UX team that boosts morale and inspires them to take control of their work
Introduce my team to standard UX tools to better understand the customer and communicate their vision to stakeholders
Lay a broad foundation of UX design by providing learning opportunities
Provide guidelines stakeholder communication to set the stage for a shift in process
key Insights
1) Team talents were underutilized and undeveloped.
I found that the team had years of experience across many types of media, including web design, graphic design, and front-end development. Each designer had a mix of unique skills and talents that were waiting to be leveraged for a great web user experience, and all they needed was a chance to practice it.
2) UX designers felt they had no authority
The team saw themselves as operations-only as they had been relegated to the role of task executors. Marketing campaign and product managers led design decisions and the designers were expected to follow.
This dynamic created a very top-down relationship between the two teams, which the UX team assumed was intentional, leaving them with little sense of agency over their own work.
3) Voice of customer was absent from the design process
One of the most critical aspects missing from the design process was some form of VOC. The team simply built web pages as instructed, then moved on to the next one without circling back to understand the impact. They didn’t have access to Google Analytics, Hotjar, A/B testing or SEO tools to monitor user behavior and guide design decisions.
APPROACH
Understand established processes, attitudes, and opportunities
Joining as a new manager meant that my job was to observe the status quo and identify opportunities. I scheduled regular 1:1s with my team, spoke with the team’s former manager, and met with various cross-functional stakeholders to understand our relationships.
This approach ensured that I understood the “why” behind established practices before changing anything, and allowed me to establish trust between my team and our stakeholders.
Problem
The web experience was dictated by marketing campaign managers, which led to low team morale and a disjointed buying journey.
When I joined Sartorius as Manager of Digital UX in 2021, I found the team building web pages exactly as instructed by campaign and product managers who, by no fault of their own, weren't trained in web best practices, let alone UX principles.
This was problematic because UX designers didn’t seem to have any authority over their work and the website content flow was often inconsistent and devoid of standard design principles.
I needed to figure out how to turn the team around and bring meaning to our function: Digital User Experience.