Designed to Wow! Transforming an organization

Madhavi Sarabu at UXDX Community: Transformation: The User Experience Problem of Our Time. Video: https://youtu.be/bNm-bPnpmRs

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Bad design is my kryptonite

[00:00:00] Thank you. Thank you, Dean. Hope you guys can hear me and see me okay. We had a little bit of technical difficulty at the beginning of this presentation. As Dean mentioned, I'm currently the VP of UX and Design at Jaggaer[?]. And I'm here to share some of the learnings that I had from leading teams and transforming organizations, from multiple companies over the last several years.

[00:00:24] Before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about myself. Bad design is my kryptonite, and I think all of the UX designers here will agree, or anyone in the design field will agree, that UX designers are kind of like doctors. Doctors make bad patients, that's what everyone says. And we are terrible users. We have a mental model and we want that to be how the products work. Every time I open a Costco gallon of milk, for folks in the US, you'll see me screaming at the house. And every time I open a packaging, you'll also see me screaming at the house.

[00:01:05] Things like, why would a light bulb, which is the most fragile thing, come in a little cardboard box, whereas a knife, which you can't do anything about it, will come in something that is so hard to open? So back in the day I used to always come up with these design problems. Why do they do this? Why do they do that? And then I realized it's also my superpower, because now I'm thinking about how do I solve this problem. I think as UX designers and UX leaders, we have that superpower where we know intrinsically, as soon as we see something, what is the problem with that and how do you want to solve that.

[00:01:42] Three of my passions are design, of course, and then leadership in general, leading UX teams in particular, as well as sharing my learning so that others hopefully learn from the mistakes and don't repeat those.

[00:02:02] One thing I wanted to mention is the difference between UX leadership and UX managers. There are several people who are managing other UX designers, managing larger teams, and there are other solo designers who wear multiple hats. But regardless of who you are, the area of influence for you is a whole lot bigger than your area of control. What I mean by that is you can influence people by how you do stuff, how you come across, how you collaborate with them, how you partner with them, and so on. So think about your authority or your power not being limited to, hey, this is the only thing that I can control, but it goes a whole lot bigger and more beyond than that.

Build your brand

[00:02:54] The first thing I would say is we all need to start with building our brand. You probably heard this from several other people before, but it is truly important. I'm going to share my story. A few years ago, actually several years ago, I was really struggling as a solo designer on my team, and it's like, what is going on? No matter how hard I try, I'm not making a big dent or big impact. And I reached out to one of my sales co-workers at the time and he said, okay, did you build your brand? I'm like, what do you mean building my brand? He said, you've got to build your brand. Even the best product needs marketing. So what are you doing to market yourself?

[00:03:35] And building a brand doesn't mean that I go and create a logo for myself or a design for myself. It's about who I am as a person, who I am as a designer, who I am as a leader. So you've got to start with what is your why. Simon Sinek does this a lot. So what's your why? Why are you in this field? What motivates you? What drives you? You've got to be really thoughtful about that, and put that down on a piece of paper. What is your why?

[00:04:05] And what do you want to accomplish in an organization? In order to transform an organization, and I use that term very broadly, an organization could be an entire company, it could be a small design team, it could be a small product team too. So what do you want to do in that organization, if you want to transform that? You focus on all of the things that you can do as a person.

[00:04:30] And then you also need to figure out how will you succeed. You've got to have your measurements for success. How can I make sure that I am succeeding in what I want to be? All of these things are your brand. That's what makes you who you are and who you are as a leader.

[00:04:50] So mine, I'm sharing again my journey through this process. My mantra is designed to wow. Anything I do, I want to wow our users. I want to wow the organization as well that I'm in. So design to wow is my mantra. That's what I use in all of my dealings with people around me. So much so that our customers come to me and say, hey, this is not wowing me. You've got to do something different. The UI or the UX that you built is not wowing me. So it's become a thing of its own. I use that fairly regularly and frequently in all of my talks. So that's my thing.

[00:05:29] And you've got to figure out what is your why, what is your brand, and come up with one sentence that explains it, that's easy to understand.

Vision, themes and the path to execution

[00:05:40] And then, okay, now you've got your brand. So what is your vision for where you want to be? For the organization, for yourself personally, what is your vision? What do you want to accomplish? For me, I want to leave the organization in a better place than I started. Every single day, every single month, every single year that I'm at that organization, I want to make sure that we are moving forward, we are making progress, and we are leaving it in a better place.

[00:06:05] You need to have a vision for where you want to go, where you want to take the organization, and also get alignment along the way from all the key stakeholders. So build your vision. You've got to really focus on the why, the what, and the how you're going to get there, in order to build the vision.

[00:06:27] And this is my personal vision, and when I go to an organization or a company, I make sure that that's the vision that we set for individual organizations as well. My vision again is to delight our users with great experiences. So you've got to come up with your own vision statement that is a motivator for everyone on the team. People can align behind it.

[00:06:50] So you start with the vision, and then you identify core themes of what you want to tackle when you start at an organization, or even if you've been there for a long time. What are the UX themes? The typical UX themes are simplicity, consistency, et cetera. Easy to use, intuitive. We all know what these themes are. But pick those themes, and then keep at them. As you go along on the journey, you'll realize that, hey, consistency, you've made a big dent in consistency, so you move on to the next one. So first start the vision, then identify your themes, and then slowly start on the path to executing on that vision.

[00:07:37] So there are three things that work for me. How do you get from a vision to a plan to an execution? These key three things are alignment, alignment within the organization; immersion, one of my core themes is design's not a solo sport, it's a team sport, so how do you get others to buy into your vision, how do you make sure that others come on that journey or get on the train with you in order to get to your final destination; and then productize, because anything needs a repeatable process, a repeatable product. So if you think about design as a product in itself, how do you productize design?

Alignment: don't swim against the tide

[00:08:21] Alignment is really key. The first thing I would say is don't swim against the tide. This is really hard, as you can imagine. Sometimes it's a rip tide and you get sucked in, but don't swim against the tide. If you were to go for braces, for example, to a dentist, and the dentist said, yeah, you know what, none of these look right to me, so let me just knock out all of the teeth and start from scratch. I would probably just run from the dentist right there. So you've got to figure out what the business goals are, what the outcomes are, and then align with those goals. Without alignment, we're not going to get a whole lot farther than being in the same place. So that is very important.

[00:09:09] How do you get alignment? How do you know what the company wants out of your design team? How do you define success for your design organization? But more importantly, how does the company define success for the design organization? It is really important for us to know what's important for the company. Typically they fall into a bunch of buckets. Customer retention: for SaaS companies, customer retention is a big deal. So you want to make sure the customers are happy, they're delighted, so that they're continuing to use our products. New customer acquisition: how do you get more customers to the table? How do you bring more prospects to the table? And then of course increased revenue is always at the top of mind for any company. We're not working in charities. The companies are there to make money and we're there to help them succeed, in addition to making it user-friendly as well.

[00:10:06] Know also what is important for the product team. As UX designers and leaders, we do a lot with empathy, empathy for our users. We do user testing and all of that stuff, but we don't spend enough time understanding what is important, who our partners are, who our peers are in the company, and treat them with the same thing. Treat them as a user. What would you do? Understand their pain points. What are their pain points? If it's a product team, figure out what is important for them. Is it time to value? Is it time to market? Sometimes we may have to do things faster, so we release something fast to get in front of the door. So what are those things that are very important for the product team? What are the important things for the engineering team?

[00:10:50] Know your peers in the department, know your peers across the organizations. If it's a customer success team, go find out what is important for them. If it's a customer support team, go find out what is important for them. And building partnerships is key. You've got to understand their pain points and help them solve that. That's how you make a friend.

[00:11:15] And then product tripods. A lot of people have talked about product tripods. What happens if all the three legs of the tripod are perfectly balanced? You have a nice place to lay that vase or whatever. But if one of the legs is broken, then there's no way that product is stable. So product, engineering and UX, these are the three legs of the tripod. We've got to make sure that we're in alignment, moving at the same pace. Sometimes the product team is moving ahead and the UX team is moving behind. Sometimes the UX team is moving ahead and the product team is behind, or the engineering team. But we've got to stay in alignment throughout the process. And we introduced a whole bunch of different techniques to get there, and I'm going to share some of them with you now.

Immersion: show, don't teach

[00:12:06] The second thing I said is very important is immersion. So we start with educating what UX is and how we do stuff. How many of you have talked about fonts and colors and kerning and this and that? Outside of the UX designers, no one cares anymore. Customer success team: you don't care about the techniques they use to do what they do. You're more worried about the outcomes. So you've got to show them the outcome of doing what you do on a daily basis. Spend less time teaching them what kerning and font families and font weights are, and more time talking about the outcomes from a user perspective. Hey, if you use a bigger font, then you'll get more readability, and things like that. So try to explain that.

[00:12:59] Don't talk about information architecture. Instead, talk about what does information architecture do to your product. I use the example of a junk drawer all the time. Without information architecture, you get a junk drawer where people are just dumping stuff in. You can't find anything in there. So use examples, use storytelling. Dean, who just spoke before me, was a wonderful storyteller. So you've got to bring in personal examples, make it personal for them, and show them what that looks like and feels like.

[00:13:32] The first thing is, if you show, don't teach, that's my mantra. Show something, and they'll learn faster. And if you immerse them in the process, they will learn even faster. So think about you and me, how do we learn a language? We go do immersion in the country of origin. That's the easiest way to learn a language. It's the same thing about UX design. You've got to immerse your peers and the other people that you work with in the journey, so it makes it a little bit easier for them to follow along.

The design jam

[00:14:07] So I personally use design thinking as a framework. I don't follow it exactly to the T, but I use the design thinking framework of understanding, ideating, validating and introducing, and that circle continues as we go through this journey. How we execute on this framework is by using a design jam, is what I call it. It's a framework that we created over the last several years. It's a modified design sprint, is what it is. So if you read Design Sprint from Jake Knapp from Google Ventures, it's a five-day process of understanding to testing. But in companies, typically, getting a whole bunch of stakeholders in a room for five days straight is never going to happen. So I realized early on that that's not something we can easily do. So I break it down into three two-hour sessions.

[00:15:04] Day one is understanding, and then you go along on the journey. And some of the steps of the design sprint are outside of the design jam. This is a framework that is working really well, and you don't have to do these three sessions simultaneously, one day after the other. You can even break it down. So I would suggest understanding the problem, really getting to the root of the problem: you could do a session on that on week one, and then you maybe ideate some solutions in week two. So I'm going to quickly share what we do for this design jam.

[00:15:41] The understand process: you need the stakeholders who truly understand the user problem. In some cases you may bring in users. In other cases you bring in the user representative, whether it is a product manager or a customer success manager, or someone who's talking to the users all the time. You bring them in, and you spend a couple of hours understanding and mapping out that journey of that particular user, and then figuring out what do we want to solve for in the next three days.

[00:16:11] What this means is that you've got to do your groundwork before that. You've got to identify your stakeholders. You identify a problem, and then you come to the meeting, and even before that meeting you kind of present what are we trying to do with this three-day, six-hour design jam. So this has been very successful for us. People get excited, and participation is key. So you identify people who can actually contribute to that.

[00:16:40] We spend day two, and I'm using that term day two very loosely, as I said you can do it in week two as well, on ideation. And when I said immersion in the design process, ideation is where the managers and others can contribute very easily. Hey, we're trying to solve the security problem, like Dean mentioned a few minutes ago. So what are some of the ideas where we can make that a little bit better? It's not just the UX designer's job, but everybody who's feeling this pain can help us solve that problem. So we get really creative about coming up with ideas. We look at competitors. We look at how others have solved this problem. And it's a really cool way to collaborate and come up with solutions together.

[00:17:26] And then day three we spend creating a storyboard of sorts, to figure out what kind of prototype do we want to build. Day three is literally setting up for a prototype building session. And then we build a prototype after the design jam, and validate with users. So all of that stuff happens outside of this framework. So, six hours very well spent. You get a lot of collaboration and problem solving and brainstorming from these three sessions. So highly recommend it. If you have any questions, reach out to me. More than happy to help out.

Productize the design process

[00:18:03] And then I said productize. We as design leaders and designers need to have a repeatable process that we can use. It's kind of like pulling tools out of a tool belt. So if there's a problem X, there's a solution Y. Same thing we do with problems, we've got to do with our design process too. So are you trying to solve a new problem? Is it an existing problem? Is it a new UI that you're creating, or is it an addition to an existing one? All of these things come together to build a process like a mosaic, like tiles in a mosaic pattern. All of these things come together to make up a beautiful process. So you've got to figure out what those templates are. How do you make sure that you're sharing that with outside stakeholders?

[00:18:57] And then consistency, flexibility and transparency are your three best friends. Whatever you do, be consistent with that. People need to know what to expect. You solve the problems, and all of that should be fairly straightforward and easy to understand.

[00:19:18] Transparency. When I say transparency, it's not just about exposing your process to others. It's also about what are you working on right now. Different departments in the company need to know what you're working on. So it should be fairly easy to understand, easily available. And if someone asks you, hey, what are you doing, you should be able to tell them exactly what you're doing. It's not about keeping track of what you're doing, but more importantly it's sharing so that others can prepare for the next step of the journey.

[00:19:50] And then what is your road map? At the beginning of this talk I shared that you have to show them a vision and a path to get there. So what's on your road map? What is coming up and how are you going to solve these problems? And all of these need to be like that golden thread that weaves through the entire product line. So what is your road map? How are you going to share that? Make sure that it is available in a shared document repository somewhere. A lot of people use Confluence, some people use other sources. So make sure that it is available for anyone in your company that wants to see it. And then who do you want to validate it with is another thing. So you validate it with users. Make sure that's available too.

Start small and scale through champions

[00:20:36] And I want to make sure that, you're doing all of this stuff, but don't forget design's fun. This may seem like an uphill battle sometimes, and sometimes it is really hard and challenging, especially if you're starting out from scratch in a brand new design organization. It feels like a thankless job, but doing everything that you do every day is just going to build that excitement in the company.

[00:21:02] So one recommendation I have is don't start big. Don't start solving all problems for all people. Start small. Pick something that is really, really small and very valuable to the company. In my case, several years ago again, the biggest pain point was that sales people couldn't show upcoming ideas to prospects. So a simple thing, as simple as a prototype or a wireframe, was really a game changer for them. They could share that with customers or prospects and say, hey, this is what's coming up. And people were excited about that. So pick something that is very small, that is meaningful, that is impactful for the organization, and then start there.

[00:21:46] And guess what? Kind of like the great products, word of mouth. Some other product manager or some other department within your organization is going to realize, oh wow, this is awesome, let's repeat that. So your peers and your other stakeholders become your champions. That's how you scale design. I really strongly believe that as UX designers, our job is not to be designers but design enablers, making sure that other folks in your organization are enabled and capable of identifying UX problems and bringing them to the UX team's notice and attention.

[00:22:28] So with that, I have a few minutes for questions if there are any, but thank you to the UXDX team for having me. Rory, I can't see any of the chat, but let me know if you have any.

Q&A

[00:22:42] Rory: Thank you very much, Madhavi, for sharing. That was, I thought it was really comprehensive and really quite interesting. Although I feel a bit of my jaw drop as you said, as you were describing it.

[00:23:00] Rory: Yeah, so if anybody has any questions out there, please do post them in. But while we're waiting for people to get warmed up and ask some questions, I had one because I really liked your