My Product Design Perspective

No one wants to use your software. They want the value your software delivers. Technology is ultimately a workaround. People don’t want to drive cars, they want to get somewhere faster than their body will take them. Sure people can enjoy driving a car, but most people would rather blink their eyes and be at their desired location. This is the whole idea of A.I.—to get from thought to value with no effort.

How I Work With Others

Playing team sports, I learned what we owe each other in reaching our shared goal. When I help my teammates be successful, we all win together. I learned it’s important to come through when the ball is coming my way—to have put in the practice and focus to make the play when needed. I learned to be there for my teammates as backup in case the ball doesn’t bounce their way. I also learned to let my teammates be the expert of their position and to trust them to make the play as well.

In the world of product design, this means clear and timely communication, clearly defined scopes, agreed upon timelines, and addressing action items right away. It means trusting the expertise of product managers, developers, researchers, copywriters, accessibility experts, design system owners, marketers, sales folks and leadership across the organization. It’s not only to my job to make the play when the ball comes to me, it’s my job to help everyone on my team not fail.

I learned from my coaches, that as a leader, it is my job to inspire my teammates to do their best work. And it’s also to remind them of their best selves in their worst moments. I understand each teammate has a different set of incentives. And how I communicate with them should speak to those incentives.

I recognize we all come from different backgrounds with different worldviews and with different strengths and weaknesses. People want to belong and feel valued. In order to foster a sense of belonging, I honor peoples’ differences. And I create safe spaces where people feel heard and the team views me as approachable and coachable as well.

My Approach

Determine What To Deliver

I work closely with product managers to shape the product roadmap. Business objectives, user research, market conditions, emerging technologies, tech debt, and UX debt all drive the prioritization of what gets done next.

Define How and When It Gets Delivered

I work to define the scope and timelines. Usually I distribute the work across Agile sprints in collaboration with the product owner. Then I get into research. I prefer to get low-fidelity concepts and prototypes in front of users for validation. I will also conduct stakeholder workshops during this explore phase. I bring in not only the product team but also subject matter experts, customer support agents, analytics specialists and sales people. Really anyone who has a pulse on what users are saying they want from the product. Once I have some solid wireframes, I like to go back to users to make sure I heard them and I’m meeting their needs.

Design High-Fidelity Prototype

After user feedback is incorporated I can now kick off the high-fidelity prototypes. While I constantly keep developers in the loop, I make sure we connect in between low-fidelity and high-fidelity phases. The developers’ perspective is invaluable. I want to make sure the design will ensure development is efficient. Additionally, developers often have great ideas for how the design can meet the acceptance criteria.

I show designs from my design team to the product team frequently getting buy-in and feedback. Once I have an approved workable prototype, I check the design for compliance with the design system and accessibility. Then I put the prototype in front of users again. From there, I’ll incorporate feedback and get the prototype ready for dev handoff.

Deliver Prototype

At this point, I have involved the developers so they are already up to speed on the design. However, I then get into the details of the design with annotations for the interactions as well as annotations for accessibility requirements. Once I’ve handed it off, it’s my goal that developers never have to ask how something works. I make sure they have all the assets they need as well.

After dev handoff, I like to have a meeting with the analytics stakeholders along with product to call out anything we want to measure that isn’t standard tracking.

Measure Success

After launch, I monitor the analytics and any user feedback to assess the performance of the design. I then work with the team to refine what we launched.