Creating a UX Team within a Large Enterprise

Sharing Ownership of User Experience

“For people in different disciplines to collaborate well together on a product team, it is imperative that they understand the goals, work practices, and value of their peers in other disciplines,” advises Pabini. “They must learn to speak one another’s language. Each of the core disciplines on a product team—Product Management, User Experience, and Engineering—contributes to the user experience. I’ve explained what it means to share ownership of user experience and the role each of these disciplines plays in defining a product’s vision, functionality, and form, in my article ‘Sharing Ownership of UX.’ My article also explores barriers to collaboration—the barriers that typically exist in a large enterprise that has been slow to adopt User Experience—and how to overcome them.”

“The biggest challenge is establishing the right perception of User Experience,” replies Jordan. “I wouldn’t call it a department or make it feel separate from the rest of the product-development organization in any way. Your key goal should be achieving seamless integration of experience design throughout the organization, regardless of departmental constraints or restrictions. User Experience should not be just a department. It’s a mentality, a thought process, and an ideology that an organization needs to adopt. A User Experience department should not try to own the experience. They should instead equip entire product-development organizations with the knowledge and tools the various disciplines must master to be able to accept responsibility for their portion of the experience.”

Avoiding Isolation

“A huge challenge for the members of a UX team within a large corporation can be isolation,” responds Gavin. “If a company wants to spread the value of User Experience across the entire organization, they’ll likely matrix manage the team, adding User Experience across teams. This is often the case whether User Experience sits under Product Development, IT (Information Technology), Product Management, or Marketing. In such a case, a UX professional might touch several different projects, but there probably won’t be four UX professionals on the same project. This can create a feeling of isolation for people on the UX team, so it’s important to support them as they deal with variables that are not just technical. They often have to deal with political and interpersonal challenges. The organization must recognize that UX professionals need to feel that they are part of a collective team. While UX teammates might not work on the same projects, they can still offer their support, giving one another the feeling that they are part of a group. UX professionals need to bounce ideas around and feel that they are not the lone expert who must make all decisions.

“When I first started my career in User Experience, I was part of a UX team, but matrix managed. I was assigned to a productivity team that was creating an assessment to measure efficiency. Essentially, I had to measure user experiences. So I came up with an assessment, then presented it to the UX team. An imposing figure in the meeting rose up, leaned across the table, and said, ‘Son, we have been there and done that. You have to give us more.’ This is what happens when you’re left alone on an island. The UX team collectively helped me to reposition the work I had done and sell the naysayers, as well as those who thought they inherently knew right from wrong. This was a challenge that could be overcome only through persistence and collective support.

“As a result of such experiences, I adhere to a philosophy that started at User Centric and is now established at Bold Insight,” continues Gavin. “You want to work in a place where you can walk down the hall and ask someone a question. Once you ask a question, what should happen next is that the person you ask stops what he or she is doing, looks up, and says, ‘I have done that before, but if I had a second chance to do it, here’s what I would do based on what I learned.’ They would share their wisdom and sketch a solution on a piece of paper or a whiteboard. That’s what UX professionals need. They shouldn’t feel like they are a singular expert. Creating collective knowledge for use by all is key to building a UX practice. This is the solution to the challenge of isolation.”

Organizing for Success

“Organizing UX teams for maximal success at different stages in a company’s UX maturity is the subject of an excellent book by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner, Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams,” recommends Pabini. “The authors have been presenting workshops and making frequent appearances at conferences since the book’s publication. I suggest you read my review of their workshop, which I attended at O’Reilly Design Conference 2017—or my review of Peter’s talk on this topic at Enterprise UX 2017.”