Breaking down silos with a UX strategy for Workopolis

A Little Context

My Old Stomping Grounds

“There’s tons of low-hanging fruit,” Frank told me. He was the VP of Technology at Workopolis, Canada's largest job search website, and he was inviting me to come back to the company I’d left a year earlier. I’d been the sole UX practitioner, and now Frank was offering me the role of head of UX.

I’d had a hard time leaving Workopolis in the first place—it was a fun company, full of great colleagues. But when I started my new role, I discovered that things had changed while I was away…

Hidden Pain

When I returned, I found a mostly-new executive team and Marketing department—and a product development team that was cranky. They were getting pushback from stakeholders in Marketing on their work, and I heard about a disastrous project that was pulled from release at the last minute—twice. There had been a couple of tense months, and I could sense it around the office.

So I set out to figure out what had happened.

The Problems

Trying to practice Agile in a Waterfall world; and trying to design without designers

After interviewing stakeholders across the organization, I determined that there were a couple of key problems the organization was contending with:

• The development team was practicing Agile development, but the stakeholders in Marketing were expecting a Waterfall process of checkpoints and approvals; and
• They hadn’t backfilled my role when I left a year earlier, which meant no-one was responsible for UX design, which meant design by committee.

The Approach

I created a UX Strategy for my new team that outlined:

• our UX direction, including a vision, mission, and a set of concrete goals and objectives for the coming year; and
• a set of proposals to get us there, including an Agile UX process.

Articulating a vision, mission, and plan

I started by asking my new team what they aspired to achieve. One key consideration was that most of the team was focused on UI development, so I proposed a joint vision and mission encompassing both UX design and UI development. That gave us a more cohesive approach and, critically, buy-in from the team.

I also developed four themes for the year:

• accessibility
• consistency
• measurement
• usability

For each of these themes, I drafted objectives and pegged them to a quarter in the upcoming year. I shared these with stakeholders and executives, who loved the clarity of my team’s approach. They bought in, too.

So, we had rallied around a vision, a mission, and a plan.

So how would we get it done?

Getting Agile

A key part of my strategy was integrating our design work into the development team’s Agile workflow. I proposed an Agile UX process known as “Sprint-ahead,” based on an approach pioneered by Autodesk.

In short, my team would start designing at least one sprint before development would begin. That would give us time to validate designs with users, and give stakeholders time to give input or feedback. It seems so simple, and having practiced Lean UX for a few years, I see how we could have taken it further. But for that team and company at that time, it solved some critical pain points and unlocked potential for a productive team.

Results

• After two years, my team had grown at a time when the company was contracting—a sign that the executive team valued what design brought to the organization;
• I trained the UI developers on my team in various aspects of UX design, so that they could contribute more to our design efforts within their scrum teams—and they asked for more; and
• We shipped several major new designs and redesigns, including a new Ecommerce flow that increased conversion by 40%-60% within the first few months, and started a responsive redesign of the application.

Lessons Learned

• A team needs a vision and mission to rally around, and the design leader’s role is to articulate that vision.
• Solving UX challenges is often a matter of diagnosing and solving organizational challenges.
• That means treating stakeholder interviews like design interviews: be curious and empathetic, explore the problem space, and then focus on solving their problems.