What I do, as a UX Lead…in 3 drawings

In January of 2021, I started a new job. I met my team, my stakeholders, and then visually documented all the necessary processes. Without showing exact artifacts, the user flows looked something like this:

You can see that in January, we knew the starting point of our most important journey — go us? But we hadn’t defined the ideal end point, the happy path, the metrics to measure, nor did we have aligned incentives to standardize the process. There were more unknowns than knowns. Thankfully, ambiguity is my happy place. Let’s Goooooooo!

Come October…wowwie! We had a defined endpoint. We had a happy path, agreed upon KPIs, and a documented ideal process. We had means of tracking the user flow, and processes for UX intervention to understand ‘why’ customers and internal users were deviating. We had shorthand, like personas and aligned internal vocabulary.

Then, in March (has a year really flown by?!) — the journey looked like this. We have 80% of customers on the happy path. We have targeted problem areas. We have a regular cadence of speaking with users to uncover pain points and optimize. We have cross-functional OKRs/KPIs so we constantly know how we’re doing. And the cherry on top — this work helped build a foundation so we can now define the future together & truly innovate.

Of course there are millions of artifacts I could share that got us from image one to three, but overall, I think these 3 images explain best what a UX Lead does for an organization.

Hope y’all enjoyed it.