Enabling the Team: UX Frameworks for Wide Org Success

Kremena Pehlivanova at UXDX Community: Colleague Experience and PM Onboarding. Video: https://youtu.be/-bJrr_wapxc

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.

Colleague experience at VMware

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, and thank you for joining. Today we'll be talking about UX frameworks and different strategies that we use at VMware. I'm a senior UX manager there, in the lead of our UX design team, and I really hope that today's session will be productive and useful for you. I want to share VMware's colleague experience journey as we built our first employee-facing team in VMware, with a focus on technology enablement, process improvements and future of work practices. It's a five-year journey that included many ups and downs, a lot of lessons learned and a lot of different restructurings and strategy readjustments that aim to ensure this newly built colleague experience framework is effectively and efficiently supporting cross-business-unit and organizational success.

[00:00:37] Some of the topics we'll cover today: what is our approach to colleague experience at VMware? What are some of the domains that we have identified and created, and how do we allocate resources accordingly? What is our organizational structure and how is it built to support this transformational effort that is happening within VMware? As well as some roles, responsibilities and some different strategies around process, and how we evaluate the impact of our work.

[00:01:25] First I'll start very briefly with what employee experience is by definition. This term encapsulates what people encounter and observe over the course of their tenure at an organization. Some professionals still think of employee and colleague experience as a term very specific to human resources, which for us is not true. Colleague experience for VMware is way more complex, and we define it as every employee touch point with technology, process, physical experience, policies and even interactions with other employees. How people collaborate synchronously or asynchronously, how they communicate, how they set up their home office stations, environments, etc. Those are all elements of colleague experience and employee experience for us, and we believe that every mature organization, even a customer experience mature organization, needs to tackle this at a certain point of its journey.

[00:02:23] Data shows that investment in colleague experience has significant impact on innovation, customer satisfaction and revenue. And with that, more and more companies are investing a lot of resources and realizing how great workplace experience impacts their businesses.

[00:02:41] For VMware, as I already mentioned, this journey started about five years ago, and it started as an IT-oriented and IT-specific colleague experience team. Initially the scope of our work was to create custom-built solutions for IT and engineers and to evaluate the technology experience at the company. Of course, this included improving productivity for IT teams, automating a lot of the manual work that was happening, but it was again very IT-specific and IT-focused. As we got more traction and visibility across the company, our focus expanded and we began to engage in a lot of foundational research and design efforts that aimed to support the business transformation that was happening across the company. I'll talk a little bit about this in the following slides.

[00:03:33] In terms of our approach to colleague experience, we believe that this is the foundation of why we're successful in this space, because this approach helps us ensure we're making data- and research-driven decisions while also focusing on the human factor and empathy building across the company. We believe this is very important because we are a very big technology company. For us it's very easy to jump to technology and let the technology dictate the solution, instead of focusing on the actual need or problem we are trying to solve. This is why we have a very colleague-first mindset. We have empathy[?] as our key driver, and we leverage methodologies such as design thinking, for example.

Structure and domains

[00:04:24] In terms of our structure, we are part of the worldwide operations organization, which is a relatively newly built organization within VMware. We use a centralized organizational model where all UX team members report to a UX manager, and UX designers and researchers work on various products and efforts as needed, acting as consultants to the rest of the organization and the rest of the business units, because there are a lot of them, as you can imagine, for a 40,000-employee organization.

[00:04:57] The advantages that come with this structure are a lot. First, this agency model gives us a lot of visibility across many different areas of the business. And this of course increases not only how our work is perceived but also the impact of our work, because we can actually contribute to different pieces of the puzzle. We have the opportunity to engage with senior leaders and influence decisions in relation to all aspects of colleague experience: HR, IT, sales, productivity, marketing, etc. This inevitably impacts the team, as we are provided with many different opportunities for growth within each space, domain or even within different products. And of course, this also ensures our designers and researchers can be allocated to a project or a domain based on their expertise or their particular interest.

[00:05:53] VMware is in the midst of a company cultural transformation, as we're currently being acquired by Broadcom. This is a very expensive deal. I assume some of you have heard about it, hopefully most of you have heard about this. And at the same time we're also going through a subscription and SaaS transformation that predates the Broadcom acquisition news. With all those changes happening at the same time, a lot of challenges are coming our way, and we need to adjust and make sure we are operating in a way that supports the different business transformation efforts that are happening across the business units.

[00:06:34] For that reason we have defined the so-called domains, or you can call them spaces. For us those are HR, subscription and SaaS commerce experience, IT support and experience, future of work and work practices, and our process-related activities. Of course those processes are oriented around HR, onboarding, etc., and I'll briefly cover this as well. In terms of our HR and technology experience and the work within that domain, our partners play a crucial role in enabling VMware leaders and employees to navigate successfully through VMware's transformation. Our goal there is to really provide timely and relevant solutions for our colleagues to drive business outcomes. And of course this means not only streamlining different processes but also automating a lot of the manual work and improving self-service and personalized experiences for HR staff and employees.

[00:07:41] In terms of our subscription and SaaS commerce experience, I would say that this is probably the biggest priority for our team and for the company right now. VMware is going faster to the future, with an increased focus on moving the company and our customers and partners to a subscription model of working. This means that we are working with our product management and development partners, and of course our business partners, to simplify, standardize and automate SaaS business processes, policies and systems. Our focus really is on implementing a holistic offer-to-cash ecosystem through research, UX strategy and design support across all the different product spaces and swim lanes within the subscription and SaaS space.

[00:08:29] Of course, we're continuously supporting our IT partners by delivering new capabilities and improving existing experiences in relation to our ticketing system, intranet, chat support and many more productivity-related solutions that we have within VMware. I already mentioned that colleague experience within VMware is uniquely set up in terms of the scope of our work. Our workplace and future of work efforts are one of those areas that are very interesting, and our research team is driving remarkable work there, ensuring that the company is adopting the best activity-based working practices and remote work practices, as well as adopting new technology such as VR and AR, and we're exploring different use cases for those new technologies coming in.

[00:09:21] In terms of continuous improvement of our process, this is a huge area of focus for us, and it is something that has continually impacted our colleagues' well-being and retention, and of course indirectly impacted cost savings around improved productivity or the time needed for a new person to onboard.

Sub-teams and roles

[00:09:47] In order for us to effectively tackle the specific challenges of each domain, because as you saw they're all very different and very specific, we have designed a variety of different approaches, strategies and frameworks that we leverage in order to drive these transformational efforts. Our organizational structure is one of those strategies, and how we allocate resources is, I would say, very unique. It's definitely not something that you haven't seen or won't be seeing in the future, but I would say that we have a very mature UX structure and a very interesting way of allocating resources.

[00:10:25] Currently we have five different sub-teams, or different fields and expertises. We have UX strategy, UX operations, UX content and communications, UX design and UX research. All designers, strategists and researchers are embedded within different spaces. For example, you can have a strategist, designer and researcher working on the subscription and SaaS domain or within an HR domain. UX strategy is a very interesting team. It is a relatively new one, and I'll speak a little bit about the role itself in a bit, but this team consists of experienced senior UX professionals that are problem space experts, and they oversee work for a specific domain or subdomain. They help us better collaborate with our cross-functional stakeholders within that domain.

[00:11:19] Design operations, or design ops: I assume this is a term that most of you are familiar with. This is a group that supports and works with our UX design and research managers to address different challenges in relation to workflows, processes, the quality and impact of our work, and also how we collaborate and align internally. Then UX content and communications, and design and research. I assume those roles and teams are very straightforward in terms of responsibilities, but I'll again go over some of those in a bit. What is even more interesting is how those roles collaborate together, which I feel is an opportunity for a lot of companies to leverage and improve the quality of the work that is being delivered.

[00:12:09] Trying to change my slide. Okay, having a little bit of technical challenges here. Very briefly, about the different roles that we have and how they differ, because I think there's a lot of value in how we define those roles and how they interact with each other. The UX strategist role is a relatively new role within VMware, and I would say in the UX field in general. It's an individual contributor role. This is really a problem space expert focusing on discovering foundational work for a specific domain. The UX strategist engages and collaborates with product owners and product managers to plan and prioritize UX efforts within a domain space or a specific product within a domain. Those people lead strategy and vision conversations with product and even service owners in some instances, and manage stakeholder relationships within that space. Of course, they also work on things like prioritization, planning and documentation, to ensure that the UX work is consistent and is embedded in the best way possible in the product development life cycle.

[00:13:29] The UX architect role is very similar to the UX strategist role, and I believe in some companies it might even be the same role. Within VMware, however, the UX architect role is more of a strategic role in terms of the end-to-end experience within a domain. This person is engaged across all related domain spaces and products to ensure there is a holistic approach to the problem solving in terms of solutions, research approach, etc. They work directly with leadership and decision makers to get buy-in and to ensure UX practices are supported across the business and from the top down. And much like the strategist, architects work to ensure UX is embedded and processes are followed by the product management and development group, but more at the high level.

[00:14:19] Then UX design and research managers. Those are people manager roles. I don't think there are any big differences in terms of what UX design and research managers do within VMware, but for us a big focus for these roles is ensuring that there is alignment between the company objectives, the business objectives, and also our internal efforts: what is the different work that is being delivered and how it connects to the wider picture. Of course, those people are leading hiring, onboarding and skill diversification for the design and research team, and are allocating resources accordingly based on expertise, interest and bandwidth.

[00:15:08] The UX subject matter expert is another role that we have defined within VMware as a way to enable our team members to grow in a way that they don't feel obligated to become people managers. I think this is a struggle in our community: in order to grow, you have to become a manager, which is not true for our colleague experience team at VMware. The UX subject matter experts, or leads, are usually domain experts or field experts that focus on a very specific methodology, or they're very engaged in a specific UX field or focus area. For example, UX accessibility lead, mobile experience lead, UX discovery lead. They deliver a variety of materials and are responsible for ensuring consistency and quality across the different spaces, domains and products. Some of the common activities that they engage in are creating different knowledge sharing sessions, documentation, enablement materials, etc.

[00:16:22] The design operations lead: I already briefly talked about this, but those are professionals that continue to support the wider design and research group to improve workflows and processes and to ensure cooperation and alignment practices are followed. They work on asset management, enabling our team in terms of tool sets, and of course even communicating some of our success stories alongside our UX design and research managers.

[00:16:53] And UX designers, UX researchers and UX content specialists: I think those are very straightforward. What is interesting or different, I would say, for our research group is the fact that our researchers are very heavily focused on foundational research, which means complex research activities that aim to map the end-to-end experience and the very complex ecosystem within VMware. You will rarely see our researchers conduct usability testing. This is something that a lot of our UX designers usually do, but of course our research team is continuously supporting those efforts as well.

The cons of the structure and how we tackle them

[00:17:36] Some of the cons that come with our structure and how we operate, and how we are tackling those challenges. Within VMware we have a lot of different efforts, but with that comes a lot of inconsistency and a lot of challenges, both internally for our team but also cross-functionally and across business units. To fight these alignment and standards challenges, we have created a unified UX process that we apply consistently across the different domains and product spaces. I will walk you through that process, and what is very interesting is how UX strategy, UX design and UX research work together.

[00:18:20] Within that process, we have things like a shared repository, a design system, libraries with assets such as icons, images and non-standard UI components that are not necessarily part of our design system, as well as clearly defined quality standards and UX checklists. All of those different strategies and tools really help us stay aligned, even though in some instances we might not be constantly communicating with each other, meaning HR designers and researchers within the HR domain might not be actively engaging with the researchers and designers across the subscription and SaaS domain.

[00:19:00] We also have a lot of design rituals. We invest a lot of time in team enablement, knowledge sharing sessions and different syncs, or even our UX review meeting that runs weekly, where all teammates can present their work and receive design critique and feedback. As well as quarterly retrospectives, where we reflect on work challenges we've had during the past three months, and we use that time to really iterate on our goals but also to create better focus for the team moving forward.

[00:19:36] Another con that comes with our structure is slow growth for individuals, and I think this is true for most complex environments where you have very diverse types of products, projects or domains. Thankfully, we've been lucky enough and thoughtful enough to create very straightforward professional level requirements, individual development plans and specialization options. The UX subject matter expert is one of those specialization options that really allows our individual contributors to grow as individual contributors, as experts, instead of feeling obligated to go into a management track. We also support our teammates by providing regular career conversations and executing skill set diversification exercises. This is both on the individual level but also on the team level, to make sure that we're informing our hiring strategy as well.

[00:20:41] Last but not least, bureaucracy. I think this is part of every large enterprise, especially enterprises that are going through big transformations where they're trying to change the mindset and the culture, and VMware is no different. Even though we are an innovation-driven company and a very tech-savvy company, for a 40,000-employee organization we have many levels of management and leadership to support the different functional groups. This means that we need to be mindful of that, and we need to be very flexible in order to accommodate the different needs and use cases within each business unit. We also need to apply tactical approaches and strategies but also keep in mind our long-term vision as our north star.

The colleague experience process map

[00:21:36] Moving forward, our colleague experience process map. I mentioned that our process is one of the strategies that we leverage to ensure high quality of our work and consistency across the different products and domains. Our process, I would say, is quite standard. We start with a discovery phase, and then we move to opportunity framing, ideation and validation. Those are broken down into very detailed and smaller phases, just to make sure we are consistently communicating with our cross-functional collaborators and they really understand what is happening within each stage of the process.

[00:22:25] As I mentioned, what is interesting is how UX research, UX strategy and UX design come together to support the end-to-end UX process, with a narrow view and scope at different stages, but also ensuring that those different fields are aligned throughout the whole process. UX strategy is highly engaged in the initial discovery and opportunity framing phases, as well as the MVP definition and prioritization work that is happening with the product management and development group. After that they take on more of a governance and Wymer[?] role, to ensure that the work that is being delivered is meeting the initial requirements that were defined and our quality standards as well, and of course that we're solving the right problem.

[00:23:22] UX research supports UX strategy in the early processes with a lot of exploratory research, hypothesis definition, definition of proto-personas, etc. After that they support the design group at the later stages with some usability testing, validation and a variety of different methods and frameworks to gather feedback and user sentiment. Design starts actively contributing at the ideation phase and is engaged throughout the whole process, and of course is continuously working with an iterative approach to deliver new functionalities and improve the already built experiences for the specific tool.

The evaluation framework

[00:24:08] Moving forward with our evaluation framework, which is also something that I would say is very unique about colleague experience at VMware. I think this is an approach that can be leveraged not only by colleague experience teams but also by product organizations as well. We have four different frameworks that allow us to have a very holistic view of the work that is being delivered and what the impact is for our colleagues and for the business.

[00:24:35] Starting with a technology experience survey, or as we call it, TES[?]. It is a biannual survey on technology satisfaction that serves as a pulse check on perceived value and sentiment on IT, business (meaning sales, HR, etc.) and other internal tools, systems and processes within VMware. This really shows the overall sentiment view at the categorical level, which means that we don't have data that is showing what application, system or process is driving a specific result. It's really an overarching measurement of colleague experience health for us.

[00:25:16] Whereas the next framework, our experience scorecard, is focused on a specific application. This is a custom-built evaluation framework that was designed by our research team, and it really focuses on several different key evaluation variables. When considered together, they inform a robust and comprehensive view and evaluation of the specific product or system we're evaluating. This method really leverages a lot of different methodologies, such as user feedback, observation and analytics, in tandem with each other to create a cohesive data narrative to measure the UX success of the specific product. And I would say it's very customizable, so it can ensure that we meet our specific domains' and specific products' use cases and needs.

[00:26:16] Then the foundational research work that our research team delivers consistently, and this is an ongoing effort for us. It's not really project- or product-driven. We use qualitative and quantitative research methodologies to understand and map complex business and service ecosystems, to identify different challenges within those ecosystems, and to ensure that we're informed, and also our partners are informed, about any process frictions that impact colleague productivity or the business success within the different domains. In my opinion, this is where our strength really lies, because this really allows us to look at our VMware ecosystem holistically and understand the deep underlying issues that decrease productivity and hurt business operations.

[00:27:11] In terms of tracking our impact and mapping our work to the organizational objectives, we have adopted the objectives and key results methodology. We can probably have a separate discussion around that, because how OKRs are applied to UX is a very interesting topic to me. But OKRs really allow us to understand how our work connects to the bigger picture. These evaluation frameworks ensure that we have transparency and accountability across the different UX fields and across the different domains, and they also help keep us honest and unbiased as we deliver and measure experiences across the different business units at VMware. Because it's very easy to become biased as UX designers, as UX researchers, we need to ensure that we have objective ways to measure the success of our work.

The impact of our work

[00:28:20] To wrap up the session today, I want to speak a little bit about the impact of our work, and how the frameworks and approaches that we discussed today have successfully helped us transform how solutions, both in terms of technology, by the way, and in terms of process, are being delivered within VMware. Before adopting a human-centered design approach, the organization really struggled with cumbersome evaluation of internal tools and processes, and there were a lot of organizational silos and an inconsistent approach to problem solving in general. Research and data were very fragmented and not leveraged, I would say, in any way, shape or form, and the walk between the different business units was lacking.

[00:29:13] As we applied our UX strategy framework, foundational research and focused work[?] on different UX maturity and UX awareness efforts, we were able to really build a horizontal view and an end-to-end holistic approach in terms of how colleague experience is delivered. At VMware, we now have a multi-layered experience framework. We have a very improved dialogue and cross-team and cross-business-unit cooperation that is happening, and we also have a multi-layered experience framework that helps us solve very complex business challenges for our colleagues and for our partners, and that helps us deliver on our business goals as a company.

[00:30:01] Of course, a lot of that work is impacting the well-being of our colleagues, job satisfaction and retention, as well as cost savings in relation to the increased productivity we provide to our colleagues. I really hope that all of this information will be helpful for you as you try to improve colleague experiences, or even experiences with your product, at your company. I'll be happy to answer any questions that came up during the conversation.

Q&A

[00:30:36] Host: Awesome. Thank you very much, Kremena. That was really interesting for me, because usually you think of UX as being end-customer focused. It's really interesting to look at it from the angle of being internally focused, so thank you for sharing that. People might be typing in their questions right now, but we have run over time. I have one or two questions that I'd love to ask you, and I'll put them into the Slack channel that I've invited you to. If you could answer them in there, that would be fantastic.

[00:31:10] Kremena: Absolutely. Thank you so much.

[00:31:11] Host: But thank you very much for sharing.