Role: Manager of Product Design
Team: 2 Sr. UX Designers, 2 UX Designers, and a UX Researcher
Year: 2024
After a few years of experimentation with our project process, my team needed a concrete and refined process for handling UX projects, especially large and complex asks.
The previous year we had established our team mission and values, as well as identifying our UX maturity level as “Structured” per the Nielsen Normal Group’s UX maturity model.
After retros and discussions with my team, two main areas of improvement emerged. We made these our 2024 Team Objectives: Solve the right problems, faster and learn, collaborate, and have fun.
In order to support these OKRs, we refined and documented an improve project process, based on the IBM Enterprise Design Thinking framework. This diagram was accompanied by a Miro talktrack explaining how other teams would interface with the Product Design team at each stage of our process.
The process diagram also calls out where to start the cyclical process based on where the project is started: from a feature idea, from a problem to solve, or from a place of pure exploration.
As a team, we put emphasis on three areas of our process we wanted to strengthen: Setting project metrics of success, running ‘North Star’ design sprints for feature ideas, and post-launch reporting on project success.
This updated process tailored our work approach to the types of projects we often found ourself faced with: large, complex issues which needed solutions sooner rather than later.
The Miro board I created to house all of our process documentation became a reference and resource for my team as well as product management and engineering. We were able to roll out the updated process with enthusiastic support from other teams and the process is working well as of April 2024.