When?

08.2023 - 12.2023

What?

Strategic Project

Who?

UX leadership team of 3

The merger of several products into a single product suite resulted in a fractured team with varying levels of UX maturity, and a persistently low SUS score averaging at 53. As First-Level UX Design Manager, I spearheaded a cultural and operational shift to embed harmonized, user-focused practices across the product lifecycle. Partnering with my co-manager and our Design Operations Lead, I designed and implemented a comprehensive UX upskilling program to embrace user research, unify processes, and transform how we approached product discovery and development together.

The Challenge

1. Parallel, Output-Oriented Roadmaps: The product had several, solution-based roadmaps,competing for resources and focused on delivering features rather than acknowledging user problems.
2. Resistance to User Research: Product managers, many untrained and under constant time pressure, often objected to or cherry-picked research findings to match a narrative from the legacy product they used to work on.
3. Fragmented Processes: Over 20 product teams operated with different workflows, leading to inefficiencies and poor collaboration.
4. Lack of UX Buy-In: Senior leadership lacked an understanding of the business value of user-centricity.

My Role

As a First-Level Manager, I spearheaded the initiative to instill a culture of user-centricity. Working closely with my co-manager Vasileios Xanthopoulos and our Design Operations Lead Konrad Röpke, I planned, designed, and implemented a program that carefully addressed the root causes of resistance and elevated the unit’s UX maturity.

Business Impact

• Increased product quality and user satisfaction by establishing a solid discovery process including user research.
• Improved cross-team collaboration, reducing time-to-market and ensuring a cohesive product experience.
• Positioned the unit as a leader in user-centric practices within the company, influencing broader organizational change.

The Improvement Program

To create lasting change, we developed a multi-faceted program consisting of the following key components:

1. UX Benchmark Study

• To show the status quo amidst limited time and resources, we created a benchmark study focusing on the product’s core component, to identify usability issues and gaps in user experience.
• We made the insights, highlighting the product’s current sub-par state compared to industry standards, visible to the broader product unit, triggering discussions around the state that the product was in.
• With the momentum created by the benchmark, we negotiated to perform proper discovery on one lighthouse case, a rework of the main product component, which was subsequently included into the product roadmap.

2. UX Maturity Evaluation & Usability Awareness Training

• Modeled after Nielsen Norman Group’s “UX Maturity Quiz”, we rolled out a survey across teams, evaluating the unit’s UX maturity and practices across all teams.
• We identified critical gaps and used the insights to design and conduct a two usability awareness trainings, one for senior leaders and one for product teams:
  • Product teams: Emphasized the importance of research and data-driven decision making.
  • Senior Leadership: Highlighted the business value of UX with case studies from successful competitors and data from McKinsey.

Key Outcomes

Our UX improvement program resulted in the following four main outcomes:

1. Process Improvements

• User-Centric Product Discovery Process: The product discovery process was re-evaluated and unified across the product unit, The result was a modernized setup, that stayed mindful of established, well-working rituals across the teams, while shifting it’s focus from outputs to outcome.
• Process Unification: More than 20 product teams began carefully streamlining their processes, enabling smoother collaboration and more consistent delivery.

2. Product Core Component Improvements

• Working together: The rework of our main product component, which was driven by our amazing UX product leads Ana Fonseca and Diego Ferrin, turned into a big project that united PM, engineering and design from several teams under a common goal.
• Improved Usability: The new design received a SUS score of 72, an improvement of 19 points over the product’s previous score (53).

3. Data-Driven Decision Making

• Strategic User Research: User research became a strategic component of product planning, influencing key decisions.
• Unification of User Feedback: User feedback consolidation was streamlined across different sources like support tickets, user comments, customer engagement days and more.
• Implementation of User Analytics: Adobe Analytics was agreed to be implemented across our product areas to collect data and analyze user behavior.

4. Future Impact on the Unit

• Dedicated UX Improvements Budget: Our engagement with senior leadership secured the product a unit-wide, ring-fenced budget to fund UX initiatives for the following year.
• Frontrunner for the Product Operating Model: One year later, our product unit was made a frontrunner in SAP’s efforts to adopt SVPG’s “Product Operating Model”, acknowledging the promising UX maturity across the unit.

Reflection

This project demonstrated the power of education, alignment, and data in driving cultural change. By addressing the root causes of resistance and showing the measurable benefits of user-centricity, we were able to transform not only the product process but also to trigger a mindset of an entire product unit.

Changing a mindset is a big undertaking and takes time. Resistance to change is normal and needs to be approached with care. When proper change management is applied, in the end the whole company will benefit from a higher confidence in working together to solve real user problems. This ultimately leads to higher user satisfaction, retention rates, and more cloud revenue - but it all starts with a with a user-centric team, that functions as one.