Thoughts, stories and ideas.
As UX/Design leaders, perhaps our greatest responsibility is to the people we manage and lead. In the latest episode of Finding Our Way , Jesse James Garrett and I addressed just how poorly we are doing to support Senior Practitioners, by which I mean folks who are about 5-10
The UX/Design Organizational Health Report revealed many factors that affect how healthy a UX/Design team is. I have long thought that whether UX/Design reports through Product Management, Engineering, I.T., or Digital wasn't that salient relative to other factors (e.g., organization size, industry, etc.
In a recent Thought Partnership session, a VP Design asked for help in thinking through their team's OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). I've been grappling with this subject since my first internal VP role, as I've worked at companies that went all-in on
Recently, a head of design shared with me how their UX metrics work was being taken up by their product management partners, to be placed on their dashboards. She shared how this upset her team, and, in digging into it with her, I realized it was because they'd
TL; DR: Critique and review are different. 🗣️ Critique is simply about making the work better. Review is about assessing readiness for the next stage in the process. Healthy critique requires ✨ psychological safety✨ . To make the work better means being able to discuss it openly, and frankly,
A few years ago, we interviewed Jen Cardello for Finding Our Way , and she shared that her team (UX Research) is peered with "market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty" in an independent Insights team. The idea was for research to avoid a functional
That Vision Thing About a year ago, I distilled the conversations Jesse and I had been having with design executives on our podcast Finding Our Way into a post titled, " Design leadership is change management. " And the first element needed to drive change? Vision, which I defined as
Thesis Design maturity models are oversimplified frameworks that mask the necessary nuance to understand and develop an organization's ability to get the most out of a Design function. That said, used responsibly, they can be a helpful heuristic, particularly early on, for orienting yourself in an organization. The
UX/Design leaders often get caught up in their personal missions, their narratives of change and impact, and believe they just need to "educate", "persuade," "evangelize" their point of view, typically one of customer-centricity and the importance of quality, in order to influence
Since I've become independent, perhaps the most common request of my time is helping companies develop good career frameworks for their UX teams. There are many reasons why they want them: Provide clear professional growth paths Smarter recruiting and hiring practices Less biased performance management Better alignment with
A common challenge for the design leaders I support is identifying metrics. They know their team is having a positive impact, but struggle articulating it in any concrete way. They seek canonical, industry-standard metrics that prove UX/Design's value, but the reality is, no such metrics exist.
Over the holiday break, I reviewed the 5 conversations that Jesse and I have conducted with truly senior design executives for our podcast Finding Our Way , looking for lessons that could be distilled and imparted for those who aspire to such roles. As I pored over the transcripts, an overarching
Though the book I co-wrote is titled Org Design for Design Orgs , and, sure, it addresses broader design concerns (communication design, service design, hardware and industrial design, environmental design), it's focused on a kind of design org, specifically digital product/UX design orgs reflecting the bulk of
(this post is a bit of a muddle, but addresses what I see as a crisis in our field, and so I wanted to get these ideas out there, warts and all.) A manager has many responsibilities, but the job boils down to "getting the most out of their
On a  recent episode of Finding Our Way , Jesse and I spoke with Tim Kieschnick. I worked with Tim for about a year, and learned a ton from our collaboration. He's an interesting cat—he worked at Kaiser Permanente for 30 years (until retirement), and in