How to “sell” User Experience stories to the backlog?
As a Lead Designer you can be representing the design direction in your organisation during the product milestone planning meetings. Together with other Product Managers, responsible for different parts of the product, you are expected to give advise on the topics to take place in the upcoming product release.
You and your team are repetitively executing user research studies, so you are well aware about the weak points in your product. Your main goal — to make sure that the voice of User eXperience is being brought up to the table.
Product Managers are often raising great points, however they are focussed on adding more functionality to the product and less on improving user’s experience overall. It is happening due to the fact that their attention is tied to the product growth and new users acquisition, so looking back at what you already have done is seen as “less productive time”, when you are not developing any new features.
When it is your time to impress your stakeholders with findings that you and your team have discovered during usability sessions with customers - those suggestions to improve are often getting lost on the background of more profitable (as they may seem) feature suggestions that your Product Managers are pitching.
Therefore, we designers often feel being neglected by management team and in some point even are putting our hands down to representing interests of a user.
How can we succeed in bringing the voice of User eXperience to the table?
How to ensure that next time we are pitching important User eXperience issues we get the needed attention?
Here are 4 tips that are helping me and my team when talking to business stakeholders or management team.
1. Understand business needs and priorities
In order to get attention during meeting with stakeholders — you need to make sure you that are pointing out issues at the right time. If your company is focusing on new customer segment acquisition — bringing up the idea to optimise navigation system or enhance consistency — may be not the best work to invest in (if you cannot tie those problems to each other).
If User Experience is to become a strategic partner, the User eXperience team’s designs should directly reflect the company’s business priorities.
Partner up with somebody from Management team to help you deep dive into company’s goals and it’s today challenges. Asking questions like below may help:
- Where is company going today?
- Which part of the business would we like to put emphasis on?
- Where is our competition going?
- Where are we loosing revenue?
- Are we targeting any new customer type?
- What do customers value more in our competitors’ offerings than in ours?
Answering those questions - will help you & your team to understand company focus and find out how you can bring value today.
For example, if your company is trying to go after a new customer segment — you can suggest your Team’s help in getting to know this new persona and investigating how to get most of their attention to your product.
Invite few people from Management team into a User Persona workshop, then go through User Journey exercise together. Take it further by coming up with some innovative solutions focused on this new type of customer with your team. This will show your interest in helping the process of reaching business goals.
As a Design Lead, you have to work to align Design Team priorities to company’s targets and pick the right User eXperience projects to pursue to help your business reach their goals. As a result —business stakeholders will start valuing the power of User Experience more and more.
2. Speak business language, not design jargon
“To fix this problem — we need to run user research first!”
“Let’s define user personas!”
Earlier, I suggested to align User eXperience strategy to your business goals. However, it can be hard to do if you do not articulate your ideas properly.
Most of us designers speak a lot of design jargon that can be unfamiliar to people outside of our domain. In order to be on the same page in discussions with the business management layer — we need to speak and articulate their language.
Get familiar with the ways stakeholders are measuring business success, then start articulating those metrics when trying to sell your design ideas, making sure the improvements or features you suggesting feed those goals.
10 frameworks to help you measure success in design should help you to get started.
For example, people outside of the design domain will not understand your point about the need to invest into building a design system. What they can relate to — is if you will add some numbers to that, for example:
“Design systems save time & money. More than 20% of a development time can be regained. For a team of 100 developers, this means around $2 million a year.”
3. Talk about weight and importance
When seeking management buy-in for design projects that your team wants to get busy with - it is a good practice to help them understand how much effort they need to invest and how much impact it will have on the business.
Usually business stakeholders are not familiar with User eXperience methods and are afraid it might take a big investment in time and people, so addressing those concerns from the beginning may help to get their understanding.
If a project requires low amount of work and brings lots of value as a result — it will definitely attract attention of management team and make them want to try it.
I usually communicate these topics by preparing a simple XLS file with few columns:
- Product / Feature / Project title (to understand what are we talking about)
- Issue ID from issue tracking tool, like JIRA, Asana, etc. (for more details if needed)
- Defined user story (describing what is the user pain)
- Importance —numeric number, that represents the order of all items in the list from most to least urgent (from 1 to X)
- Feasibility — represents development time & effort needed to be invested (low, medium or high)
- Priority — represents business impact — low (meaning not much impact on company revenue), medium (average impact) or high (will likely bring lots of revenue).
This format will help your stakeholders to quickly understand and evaluate the impact of User eXperience work that you are about to ask the investment for.
4. Find a “sponsor” in the management team
Evangelising User eXperience at the organisation level can be a tough job, especially if not many colleagues understand the importance of it. Pitching user centric approach alone — requires lots of patience and time. Plus you have to be careful and avoid force — over-evangelising User eXperience proved to be a bad approach, and resulted in a lot of frustration and eventually a dismissal.
Partnering up with somebody — can be a great help, especially if you can get a “partner in crime” from the management layer. Find a person who seem to be open for experiment and seems to ready to empathise with a customer. Grab her to join few user testing sessions with customers to learn the problem surface.
Having this person becoming closer with customers and their needs may turn into that person becoming a messenger of User eXperience at the higher level and get more buy-in for you. This can be your shortcut to victory!
Pitching User eXperience work can seem hopeless and as not a rewardable job, however progress will come with slow pace. Be determined and work using right methods — this it will help you to open up opportunities that were not there before.
P.S. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to attract management’s attention to User eXperience work — please share tips that worked for you! :)
