The Three Vital Ingredients for a Better UX Team
I don’t want to brag, but I’m lucky.
I’m a UX Strategist leading a UX team that works really well together. Included on the team are a UX Designer, Content Strategist, and Researcher, and in the two short years we’ve worked as a team, we’ve designed solutions that have modernized our UI, improved client satisfaction, reduced calls, and saved the company potentially millions of dollars.
We accomplished all of this while making each day we worked together a genuinely enjoyable day. We knew we had something special, but it wasn’t until we started asking ourselves why we worked so well together that it dawned on us. We had the three simple ingredients that helped our everyday processes and decision-making run smoothly. Quite simply, we trusted each other, we communicated all the time, and we were unified in our decisions.
But we wanted to know more about how other teams might have their own successful ways of working. So, we asked our colleagues what was working, and wasn’t on their own UX teams? Below is just some of the feedback we heard:
“There are too many cooks in the kitchen.”
“We need to build radical trust in order to elevate the work.”
“Communication can sometimes be chaotic.”
“As a team, sometimes decision swirl causes delays and tangents that may be avoidable.”
My colleagues on these other teams are not bad at their jobs. In fact, they are very good. And yet, something wasn’t quite clicking.
This got me and my own UX team thinking… What was so special about the way we worked that had avoided some of these common pitfalls?
Irisi Tole’s article on partnership and productivity cites a study by the Project Management Institute which found that organizations embracing collaboration were 2.5 times more likely to succeed in their projects.
Likewise, Tole notes that collaboration led to a 15% increase in overall innovation, as reported by a study conducted by Forbes Insights. It also led to more informed design decisions and ultimately, a better experience for users.
This makes so much sense. How very possible it is to have the best individual UX talent on your team, but if you don’t know how to work together, to collaborate, to be human with one another… well, you won’t succeed. Not only will your team likely fail, so will the product.
And speaking of product, here’s another theme my team saw when talking to other teams, over and again:
“We lack cooperation and collaboration with Product.”
“Devs seem to have more weight than UX in prioritizing work to be done.”
We realized there was more to it than just inter-team issues. It was equally important to work together successfully as a team and to transfer that success to working with other collaborators, like product owners, developers, and scrum masters. While we hadn’t sought this type of feedback out, of course it made sense. We know that no UX team operates successfully without the collaboration of the other partners who bring our strategy and designs to life for our clients.
My UX team and I looked at how we worked together and with other partners in our work, and we broke it down this way:
We trust each other
This seems like a given for any team, right? But that’s not always the case. With many teams, particularly those working in a hybrid work environment, we spend more time apart than we do together. In fact, all four of us work at different sites! So trust is key. There are a few ways this plays out for us.
We assume positive intent, always, and remember that everyone is working towards the same goal. We trust each other to get our work done and are respectful of the need for flexible schedules. We’re human and have lives outside of work!
We respect each other’s roles and expertise but commit to not working in silos. This one is big for us. We’re all trained in UX, so the distinctions between each other’s roles can get fuzzy. For example, we’ve found that we work best when everyone contributes their thoughts and ideas, but final design decisions will be deferred to the UX designer, or final content to the UX content strategist. Our UX researcher represents the client voice in all our decisions, and as the UX strategist, I shape the full journey flow and make final decisions when we’re at an impasse.
We trust our work enough to be wrong. We embrace experimentation and user test when we’re between directions.
We talk to each other, often
Because we work across different sites, communication is pivotal to our success. For us, this means a standard Monday morning meeting to review our work for the week, check in on anything impeded, and plan what work to review with our product teams. This also means a very lively Teams chat. This chat is where we check in with one another, celebrate our wins, get feedback on our work, and share memes. It’s both our communal workspace and our pressure-release valve.
We also work to embrace vulnerability. In her TED talk on the power of vulnerability, author and researcher Brené Brown said, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” On our team, we believe vulnerability takes courage and ultimately leads to a stronger working relationship. This can mean being open about a personal event in your life or simply providing honest feedback. However, in both circumstances, we always make sure to respect our boundaries.
We ensure we’re aligned
As the UX Strategist and leader on the team, I take this one very seriously. It’s incumbent on me to set a culture of unity. This doesn’t mean simply swimming with the tide or not speaking up. Instead, it means that we embrace collaboration. We operate under the “Four Eyes” principle, which means no work sneaks out without everyone else reviewing it.
We work together to land on a solution (or multiple solutions) before bringing it to our larger product team. This ensures we’re getting the right feedback at the right time and avoids the dreaded “everyone-on-the-product-team-does-UX” issue.
For my part, I make sure that before we start any new project, I speak to the product owner to ensure we have clarity on the goal of the work, the user problem we’re attempting to solve, and the priority of the work compared with other tasks.
This has created mutual respect among us and the rest of the product team. They trust that the work we’re presenting has been fully thought-out and considered from all angles, and they respect us enough to enact it.
We’re not a perfect team (even if we joke that we are), but our shared values of trust, communication, and unity have helped us create huge successes. We’ve created production solutions that have resulted in higher journey completion rates and higher client satisfaction scores, and we love coming to work every day, because we’ve made it a pleasant experience for each other. And perhaps that’s the biggest win of all.
