Member-only story
Boosting UX visibility across the organization
Educating stakeholders and advocating for UX and research
Recently, my design team got together on-site to talk about some of the challenges that we’re currently facing. The team is split up into squads across multiple products, each with its own culture and ways of working.
We had a discussion about one squad’s concerns around design visibility across their organization. Their team is heavily engineering-driven and design seems to lack influence over the roadmap or product strategy. When it comes to design-driven priorities, like updating to the latest version of our design system, no one seems to listen or care.
On the bright side, my squad doesn’t seem to have these issues, or at least not as much. Design is treated more like partners with product management and development. I want to talk about some ideas on how a design team can boost its visibility within an organization and influence stakeholders, based on my own experiences.
Why we succeed: The benefits of Agile teams
The biggest factor in my team’s success is the way design collaborates with our stakeholders. We adopt an agile methodology, which focuses on collaborative design, exploration, and testing.
Agile centers around a set of shared team values, including open communication, collaboration, and trust. My design squad often conducts research or brainstorms ideas with our product managers or developers to bring our expertise together from a strategic, customer-focused, technical, and user-experience perspective.
One of the reasons that our cross-functional stakeholders participate in these activities is because they understand the value that design can bring to the business. For example, through several customer feedback sessions, they can see how designers are able to turn pain points into user-friendly solutions. They don’t see design as just making things look pretty, but rather improving the usability of our product, which in turn leads to happy customers.
The design squad that has trouble collaborating with their cross-functional partners works in a waterfall or siloed culture. It may seem simple to tell them to just change their work…
