Role: Senior UX Manager
Team: Product Designers, Researchers, Engineers, Product Managers
Problem
Team frustration and time wasted on duplicated efforts.
Key team members responsible for critical product delivery, were unable to focus on their core responsibilities which impacted project outcomes.
- Team members were spending inordinate time on duplication of efforts leading to time wasted, miscommunications, frustration, and ultimately distraction from focus on their core responsibilities which impacts the project.
- Our business goal was to evolve the product design and delivery practice to enable cross-functional collaboration.
Opportunity
How may we establish ways of working to support scalability, transparency and eliminate effort duplication ?
Process
Research
To set up our vision for success, I worked closely with product, engineering and business stakeholder leads to learn about their teams tasks and workflow — particularly, the tasks each team member was working on, the overlaps in work/deliverables today and where we were duplicating efforts or had gaps in the handover process.
Archetypes
I worked with UX researchers on a quantitative / qualitative program to establish CBRE specific user archetypes and their current ways of working.
Above: User Archetypes of roles in a product design, development and delivery process
Task Analysis
I worked with PMs, Engineers, business stakeholders and their leads to learn about how they work i.e., the tasks they perform to achieve their goals.
Above: Visual representation of the perceived task flow
Above: Audit of the different process flows across scrum teams
We learned of the lack of consistencies (role definitions, product & UX maturity, team compositions) across teams.
Vision
Make work enjoyable and specialisation centric.
- Induce transparency and hand-off processes
- Clarify responsibilities
- Enhance cross-collaboration and alignment
- Build team trust
- Bring in a consistent master model that aligns with CBRE processes, which can be modelled for specific product teams
I took the team on a journey, how might we create successful products by establishing and governing best practices, driving consistency and connectivity.
Above: Tried and tested best practices
At the time the FAANG companies were sharing case-studies of user-centric design and design thinking practices.
Meanwhile CBRE was largely operating as a feature factory with no capabilities to include all cross-functional teams meaningfully. Product deliveries were focused on features and planned around development capacity and schedules.
I led a multi-day design thinking workshop to explore alternative ways of working and engaging as a cross-functional team. We worked on actual feature requests and explored user-centric approaches while respecting CBRE’s business and performance KPIs.
Above: Richardson sprint
Iterative experimentation
Leverage design thinking and a user-centric approach to create compelling user experiences with rich visuals and refinements.
CBRE’s ‘Global workplace solutions’ is a busy surface with several user types navigating multiple products and points of integration.
We went through several cycles of workshops to practice alignment on the approach for design and agree on the role based tasks, hand-off processes.
Seeing the evolution of the immersive experiences for users in carrying out their facility management job presented a compelling story about the business outcome.
Above: We tested concepts that allowed users a platform experience and needed for product teams to align on interaction patterns that surfaces content and context from across products.
Outcome
CBRE’s Digital & Technology (D&T) teams work in deeper alignment and has since launched several persona driven user-centric platform experiences v/s duplicate feature sets across several products — a new approach to help CBRE retain competitive advantage with property managers, facility managers who are looking for tools to improve their on job efficiency.
- Reduced product design, development and release times
- Measured increase in CBRE digital product usage.
- Sparked cross-team collaboration across the org, which has improved product development efficiencies across three LOB’s
- Clear RACI has incorporated greater transparency and accountability within the CBRE’s digital and technology teams
Above: Comprehensive RACI
Above: RACI-Lite