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UX Management: Lacework

As a design leader, I blend my interests in driving UX strategy, transforming scrappy teams to high-performing design organizations, leading design processes from concept to delivery and creating impactful products. I coach design teams toward achieving exceptional design outcomes while aligning with organizational objectives and fostering a culture of creativity and collaboration. My design vision approach is bold yet practical. I focus on operational rigor both through hand-on design and collaboration to drive outcomes across org boundaries.

People Development

I believe in investing time and effort in understanding my team and their aspirations at a deep, human level so that they can bring their most authentic selves to work. My main objective was to tap into their intrinsic motivators, and help them be the best versions of themselves in the workplace. In order to identify and work toward their career goals, I created a career planner for each team member. This included

• "What values are important to you"
• “What motivates you at work”
• "What skills do you want to build"
• "Career goals and how we will get there"

With each team member, I had detailed discussions on each of the above areas to truly understand what motivates them, their values, areas of professional improvement, what they are lacking at the current position and where they want to go a few months to a few years from now. This was very successful with a majority of the team. We were able to map out 6 month and 1 year goals and also determine activities to reach them by having weekly check ins, self awareness and accountability. With one of the team members with whom this approach did not resonate, I created a spreadsheet with a more detailed list of goals and provided specific examples of how to achieve them. The result is that each team member is more aware of their strengths and weaknesses, is actively working toward their goals and we have fostered a stronger bond with each other. Overall, I researched and implemented several career development strategies within the team and have received positive feedback on most of those initiatives.

Cross Functional Collaboration

All of my own design projects as well as my teams’ involve daily cross functional collaboration. I believe in creating strong partnerships with all our partner teams. In order to increase our team's trust and engagement with cross functional teams, I have regular 1:1 meetings with each PM, TPM, UXR, UX leads, eng lead from every workstream. These help me stay up-to-speed on not only the granular milestones but helps connect the dots across core teams and identify any opportunities, overlaps and issues sooner. During these meetings, I steer the conversations toward understanding the user pain points, feature roadmap and resource requirements. Through this approach, we have uncovered process issues, identified resource constraints as well as built domain knowledge. As a result, it provides a better bigger picture of the project, I can better support the designers on my team and together we are more prepared to work toward the milestones.

Org Contributions

I am passionate about making domain knowledge and user data accessible to the product teams in order to build user empathy. I host monthly lunch and learn sessions which include a variety of topics ranging from cloud security trends, AMA-sessions with company leadership, day-in-a-life interviews, data-driven decision making, and professional development talks. These sessions have garnered a lot of positive feedback and continue to not only benefit the product org but provides a platform for our cross functional partners to share their work and ideas.

Process improvements

I continually assess UX process inefficiencies and identify areas of improvement for the team. Some of the several initiatives I have led toward improving operational efficiency are:

• I co-led an PDLC retro and overhaul by seeking feedback from the core team and put together an ideal process flow. I clearly defined the various stages of the product lifecycle, required activities in each stage, participants, expected outcomes and ceremonies between stages of the process. I introduced UX research to the lifecycle, set up several workshops to create flows with cross functional stakeholders earlier in the design process, brought alignment across PM, TPM, UX and Eng on the refreshed process.
• Within the UX team I observed that UX requests from PMs for features were becoming increasingly ad-hoc. I authored and socialized a design brief which provides designers with a framework to understand Product and User value, Team, Timeline and Priority of features being requested so that they can plan their design pipelines accordingly.

Operational efficiency

I regularly bring together the PMs, TPMs, UX and eng leads to have early discovery discussions and workshops. This helps everyone get on the same page, plan and react to any requirement that has a cross-team dependency. I organize all the ongoing work by the UX team along with a 6-month deliverable planning in a spreadsheet including information on other core team members, link to PRDs and Figma mockups, status, due dates and dependencies. This helps designers, UX research, PMs, Engineering, TPMs stay up-to-date on all the UX design work. Additionally, it’s an easy way to reach out to designers, and has helped with prioritization and managing a healthy balance.

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