The Enterprise UX Design Playbook
Reflections on Unifying & Leading the VMware UX Design Team
Beverly May, VP of UX Design
Welcome to VMware! November 2023 marks 1-year anniversary of leading VMware Design. Many have asked why I would join VMware during a time of such uncertainty, with Broadcom’s likely acquisition pending. Overall, I viewed this as an opportunity. Leading high-functioning, stable orgs. is relatively straightforward; leading teams facing internal or external stressors can be more interesting and rewarding, and these periods provide more avenues for professional growth and creative disruption. When I think back to the closest relationships I’ve formed in my career, they developed when we needed to perform as a unified team to execute against hard challenges. Change and meaningful challenges can gel teams, provide focus and clarity, and aid in prioritization. And generally, I do love to execute and “get things done” — it gives me purpose and personal satisfaction.
Implementing the Enterprise UX Playbook at VMware. During my UX career, I’ve led 3 large enterprise UX teams; founded and led my own UX agency for 10 years; founded and led the international UX Awards for 7 years; led smaller UX, engineering, and product teams at startups and midsize orgs; taught UX and Product Management at the graduate level for five years; and worked at several digital agencies spanning nearly every sector and vertical. From these experiences, I’ve developed and evolved my own “UX Playbook” of approaches and frameworks to address many common challenges designers and enterprise UX teams face. These methods help enterprise UX teams be more productive, boost morale, deliver higher-quality design work, and aid in executive visibility. The Playbook also helped me quickly assess the VMware team and start implementing useful strategies even in the face of significant change and uncertainty, and it has also evolved based on my own learnings at VMware.
Sharing Lessons Learned and Team Accomplishments! This post will outline some UX playbook approaches and describe how we executed them in the belief that these approaches can also aid other UX teams in similar circumstances. Along the way, it will also highlight many of the team’s amazing accomplishments this year!
THE VMWARE UX ORG. STRUCTURE
My role was to lead a team of about 275, including contractors. The team consisted of about 80% Product Designers (UX) working on different business unit products and features; a few centralized UX researchers; a centralized accessibility team of about 30 with contractors; and a small handful of centralized UI engineers and visual designers for our design system. All reported up into me for centralized line management, although UXers were mainly funded by their product’s business, while the central team wasn’t.
The UX Hybrid Platform-Product Team Structure. VMware’s UX team structure is based on a common enterprise UX “hybrid” org. model, which consists of: A. a centralized platform team providing shared resources and capabilities like tools, standards, and the design system; combined with B. distributed product UX teams aligned to different businesses and features.*
I generally advocate for this org. model and implemented it previously at GE and Allstate. It offers the benefits of centralized platform efficiency combined with domain expertise and focus within the embedded product teams. However, reporting lines and ratios need refinement for things to work “just right”, and the distributed funding model necessitates active negotiation with each business to sustain it. Most critically, “one team” behaviors must be reinforced through shared goals and expectations to minimize friction. This is part of what we are about to do during annual planning.
GETTING TO WORK
As a new leader, I first set about assessing the landscape to determine “what needed to be done” and identify initiatives I could help drive to create the most high-performing UX team that would be best positioned for any future developments, including Broadcom’s acquisition. Some additional context: the team had suffered from high churn, having been about 40% larger at its peak, and had lacked a dedicated, consistent UX executive for two years; my manager, VMware’s CTO Kit Colbert, had provided interim leadership on top of his formidable CTO responsibilities for the 8 months prior to my arrival.
Conducting UX Research on the UX Team. The foundation of any good UX is user research. In this case, as the team’s chief organization and process “designer”, my “users” were UXers and business stakeholders. I began my research by meeting with each of the 200+ FT UXers in 15–30 minute 1–1 meetings in the first few months. I also met with each of the UX teams to see work; conducted an anonymous team survey on challenges and priorities; separately, surveyed all recent resignations to determine why they’d left; and I also surveyed my directs. Finally, I met with all business-unit leads, and my peers in the CTO Office to gain their perspective on the team.
Leading UX Team Co-Creation Workshops for Consensus and alignment. It’s important when driving any kind of change to get input and buy-in from all stakeholders. To achieve this, I led a weeklong strategy ‘virtual offsite’ that included sessions with my leaders for two days, a broader group of around 35 senior UX practitioners and managers for a day, and with the entire UX team for the final day. During this workshop, I utilized bottoms-up participatory design and co-creation methods- but primarily in Excel- to collectively prioritize our challenges and future direction, as well as co-define with managers their role in overseeing creatives. The VMware UX team has amazing internal firepower, and many UXers have equivalent years of professional experience as me; this led to lots of valuable insights and suggestions being shared.
Common Themes Emerge to Guide the New Team Strategy. During this process, I uncovered several challenges that were voiced repeatedly. Most critically, there was a lack of UX research within the product UX teams, for multiple reasons: staffing, tools, participant recruitment, and know-how (which I wrote about in my prior post). Morale was also low due to a lack of team community, travel support, and in-person events; a perception of limited UX professional growth opportunities; internal silos; and limited leadership visibility. Central UX team initiatives, including our design system and accessibility guidelines, were also not sufficiently supported or adopted. There were also many good things the team wanted to retain, such as VMware’s inclusive, collaborative culture.
ESTABLISHING THE UX TEAM VISION & GOALS
The Vision: Become a Design-Led Engineering Company. In Q1, I presented an Amazon-style “6-page” team strategy to the CTO office and all senior engineering leadership. In this document, I described our mission:
“Great design is at the center of every customer decision. The VMware UX Design Team Crafts and Delivers Useful, Accessible Products and Services that: Meaningfully Solve Customer Problems, Manifest “One VMware” in Execution and User Experience, and Accelerate VMware’s SaaS Transformation.
VMware UX works across VMware businesses to define, evaluate, and optimize the user and customer experience of our offerings. Our goals are:
- Drive Customer Centricity through Effective, Consistent, Usable, and Accessible Product Designs, Validated by User Research, and
- Become a Design-Led Engineering Company through Platforming, Design Quality, and Efficient UX Best Practices “
The first bullet could represent nearly any UX team at any enterprise company, but the second reflected the strong support for UX at VMware within the CTO organization. It showed that despite VMware’s highly technical products, users, and staff, our leadership was also aware that UX, done right, is critical to VMware’s future.
Why is UX critical? VMware’s transition to SAAS necessitates a consistent, seamless product experience. As well, inconsistent product UIs had been a top usability concern in customer NPS surveys. We summarized our “UX Value Proposition” as such: Design-Led Organizations:
- Make More Money by releasing more compelling, innovative solutions that focus on customer needs**,
- Save More Money through platform UX operational efficiencies and releasing more targeted, user-validated products***, and
- Reduce Enterprise Risk by reducing the potential for catastrophic user errors and avoiding federal compliance pitfalls.
ESTABLISHING THE “ONE VMWARE UX” TEAM STRATEGY, ANNUAL GOALS AND OKRS
Aligning UX Strategy to VMware Business Strategy. We needed to take this lofty vision and make it tactical and measurable. Our annual VMware business strategy prioritized “One VMware”, improving efficiency, and an accelerated focus on SAAS and multi-cloud. The former easily translated into a “One VMware UX” team strategy that reinforced the importance of centralized UX guidelines and consistent processes, while the latter demanded “One VMware” consistent designs to ensure a seamless, usable cross-product UX from start-finish.
Introducing the UX Four P’s for UX Goals. For UX goal-setting, I introduced the UX “Four P’s” goals framework I had created at Allstate and GE- People, Products, Process, and Platform- and mapped these to our company and CTO goals. The Four Ps are a simple, flexible, intuitive way to communicate UX team goals and support individual goal-planning. All UXers were then expected to formulate personal goals that would roll up into the Four P’s.
Adding Annual OKRs to the Four Ps to Track Execution Progress. We tracked implementing the Four P’s by defining annual and quarterly execution targets and then reporting bi-weekly on team progress, as part of VMware’s company-wide OKRs. My leadership was actively involved in determining what we could and should measure and implement in a year. To establish credibility, we ensured our OKRs were ambitious but achievable- and that we met our targets each quarter. Below is the map of the 13 annual OKRs we set out to pursue under each of the Four P’s.
EXECUTING THE “ONE VMWARE UX” STRATEGY
Hurdles to Standardization. Executing the “One VMware UX” strategy was not without many challenges. There were internal team divisions, with many embracing unification and standards, but some initially rejecting them out of a desire for autonomy and independence. UX teams had also gotten used to operating with minimal oversight in a company that had historically rewarded innovation over corporate standardization.
Another hurdle came in my second week when our centralized design operations team was reallocated to other business priorities; this made implementing any “One VMware UX” initiatives extremely challenging initially. A limited new hiring budget meant we needed to judiciously prioritize and sequence hires for any central UX roles. We focused on a few choice additions in operations, UX research, the design system, and AI in the belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats”.
EXECUTING THE STRATEGY: THE PEOPLE PILLAR
Start with the People Pillar to break down silos and boost morale. We focused first on the foundational People pillar. We negotiated and integrated two remaining “orphan” UX teams that had been reporting to other businesses. We established regional site leaders in India (Aurobindo Nayak) and Sofia (Kostadin Kushlev) to informally unify the UX teams in these regions. We standardized role expectations with cross-org. evaluations for senior-level UX promotions, and highlighted “Top Talent” across UX teams at the leadership level for cross-org. visibility. We also shared the first UX team org. charts that mapped individuals to businesses and products at our town halls for cross-team awareness.
Get Involved. We initiated and launched 17 voluntary UX SIGs, or Strategic Initiative Groups, for UXers to get involved in to pursue their passions. This included things like LUMA design thinking certification, regional team meetups and social events, and our DIY social media presence across X, Medium, our UX podcasts, and Linkedin. Anyone in any UX team could join any SIG to meet new people and apply their skills in new areas.
Bring People Together. We also organized and hosted a few larger UX team showcases and events in Palo Alto, Sofia, and Bangalore. Each featured participatory design activities, booths, games the team created, showcases, food, and socializing. For example, our Palo Alto UX Design Zone featured a UX team “Trivia Game” that was loosely modeled on Jeopardy.
The India team especially outdid themselves by self-organizing and hosting a VMware Design India Expo event in August that drew over 800 people, half of whom attended in person. The Design India Expo featured external speakers, regional business leaders, booths, prizes, physical installations, and more; it also marked the first time most of our remote UXers in India visited our Bangalore HQ to meet their colleagues in person.
THE PRODUCT PILLAR
Sharing is Caring. For the PRODUCT pillar, we began by simply sharing product designs across products. A first-quarter team goal included presenting select UI designs of our main products to all UXers as part of a “UX Showcase”. Prior to this, there had been almost no cross-business sharing or reviews of UX workflows or UI designs. A second round of Showcase happened in Q3.
After the UX Showcase, we “deconstructed” the product UIs to create an audit and library of existing design patterns, with the goal of identifying critical areas for future standardization. The final 176-page audit dissected our UIs into 40 component categories.
Delivering Better Product Accessibility. The UX team at VMware also includes Accessibility. This team has individuals focused on internal education and document accessibility; strategists who ensure accessibility is a part of product requirements and planning; VPAT testers who focus on accessibility testing; and a few working on new accessibility features and innovations. We pursued several platform accessibility initiatives this year, including training the entire UX team on creating accessible internal documents through our own custom training and checklists, and ensuring all our products became more accessible through automated assessments and defect tracking with the Minimum Accessibility Threshold (MAT).
Tracking Accessibility Adherence with the MAT Dashboard. The MAT provides a single score for product leaders and executives to track accessibility conformance across VMware’s 111 “products”, with drill-down capabilities to dive into the details and status of each reported issue. The MAT dashboard helped simplify prioritizing, evangelizing, and pursuing accessibility across all businesses, and we made meaningful progress each quarter in making our core product portfolio more accessible because of it. The MAT was made possible by leveraging VMware’s automated Testing as a Service framework (VTAAS) to support Accessibility, which was a multi-year undertaking that was described by Sheri Byrne Haber in one of our UX Team Case Studies.
THE PROCESS PILLAR
Adopting a Standardized UX 8-Step Process. For the PROCESS pillar, we pursued a framework I’d developed over several years called the UX 8-Steps. We held a series of leadership and all-team workshops to optimize and adapt 8 steps for cross-team implementation at VMware. 8-Steps has several benefits over other UX frameworks: it is concrete, specific, and detailed on steps, roles, and responsibilities; it clearly highlights the role of UX research and testing throughout the process; and it maps relatively easily to the typical engineering SDLC, using terminology that product and engineering teams can easily understand.
8-Steps was intended to solve process inconsistencies across the product UX teams and to help UX “shift left” and work in closer partnership with Product on strategy and planning. 8 Steps solves for strategic impact with the first four steps. 8-Steps also addresses scenarios when UX is understaffed, not given sufficient time to deliver designs or perform QA, or there is a lack of UX-related analytics and usage data. We paused pursuing 8-Steps in Q3 once the Broadcom acquisition became imminent, but my hope is the team can pick this up again post-close.
Bolstering UX Research. To support 8-steps and amplify the research element of UX, we also pursued several critical UX research initiatives, including: 1. LUMA design thinking certification and platform access for most of the UX team, 2. UserZoom online remote usability testing software access, recruitment credits, and training, 3. Requiring each UX Lead to establish their own research plan and “own” their UX research, and 4. a cross-product UX-Lite standardized usability assessment, which also involved partnerships with internal CX and analytics teams. Some of this is covered in my Design with Us presence in the VMware Explore blog post.
The UX Lite Cross-Product Usability Assessment. Our UX-Lite standardized usability testing initiative provided the opportunity to evaluate all products against external industry usability benchmarks, as well as to compare products internally to identify those that needed the most attention. Our overall cross-product results were positive, with nearly 90% of products scoring above industry norms for enterprise software.
THE PLATFORM PILLAR
A Very Significant Clarity Design System Release. For the PLATFORM pillar, we launched a major release of our open-source Clarity design system. This release featured several significant upgrades: theming and design tokens to support more cross-product and cross-brand use cases; major accessibility enhancements in dark mode, custom themes, and condensed UIs; and completely overhauled website documentation and corresponding Figma designer toolkits. Clarity’s origins date to 2016, but had suffered from underinvestment and competing technical priorities until this past year. We prioritized the design system as a must-have centerpiece of “One VMware UX”.
A New Design Team Website! Finally, this month, we also completely redesigned and launched a new VMware design website, which serves as a single destination portal for both internal and external executives and stakeholders to learn about our team and all our initiatives and successes.
The new site showcases this team’s prodigious accomplishments, with a play-by-play accumulation of around 50 achievements on the Impact tab that date back to the UX team’s origins in 2016; highlights from our many blog posts on the Vision tab; and the new Team Hub section, which serves as a one-stop portal for internal UXers.
AND FINALLY… INCREASING UX VISIBILITY, IMPACT, AND TEAM CREDIBILITY
Gaining Greater Executive Visibility. A perennial challenge facing any enterprise UX team is gaining sufficient awareness and understanding of UX, our contributions, and product/ business impact at the senior executive level. Aside from our investment in the website redesign to showcase our accomplishments, we also ensured through the OKR process that our progress was tangible and visible, and we created a series of UX Case Studies.
Highlighting UX’s Value with UX Team Case Studies. I led an optional UX Case Studies Design Sprint in which any designer could learn to create an impactful UX case study to showcase their design work, process, and business impact. The week’s step-by-step process and fill-in-the-blanks PPT template originated from my years in leading the UX Awards and our extensive research on what makes an award-winning UX Case study; I had then streamlined the template while teaching UX. We had 30+ VMware UXers participate in the sprint and create 23 amazing UX case studies! Over a dozen videos will soon appear on our UX Medium site and vmware.com/design.
The team also aided in growing our visibility with their own initiatives: the ambitious UX India Expo event; 20% higher participation at our internal UX and Accessibility-themed hackathon (which are called Borathons internally), where 55% of participants hailed from outside UX; a few high-visibility submissions, booths and wins at our annual internal innovation event called RADIO; and our extremely inspiring Design with Us presence at VMware Explore.
Of all our efforts this year, our Design with Us presence at VMware Explore was emblematic of the innovation, passion, and engagement of this formidable team and deserves another mention beyond my dedicated blog post on the topic. As with all other UX team initiatives this year, we also aligned the design and operations of Design with Us to manifest our “One VMware UX” goal in pursuit of consistency and shared insights, rather than siloed per-product research; all UXers worked together on all Design with Us initiatives.
ADOPTING THE ENTERPRISE UX PLAYBOOK
Focus on “One UX” in all aspects- people, products, process, and platform. This blog post is very long, and it doesn’t even cover all the initiatives that we undertook this year - or all the amazing product work the team designed and shipped! Many of the initiatives described here began with the help of my “UX Playbook”, but we achieved them all as a team, and in less than a year. The accomplishment I’m most proud of isn’t the 4-Ps, case studies, website, or any one output; it’s the overall shift in team alignment, community, morale, and engagement to support “One VMware UX”. Despite all the formidable uncertainty that exists in any company during an acquisition, this team focused on the tangibles they could control, generally broke down our silos and united, and executed at high velocity and with quality, creativity, and gusto.
It’s ultimately about the team! I am immensely proud of all this “One VMware UX” team has accomplished in such a short time. With all these initiatives under our belt (as well as the team delivering great product designs!), I also believe we are each best positioned for maximum future success at VMware, Broadcom, or any future UX role. Congrats to the team! Look at all these amazing things we’ve done. And if you’re reading this from outside VMware, I hope you’ll have learned some UX strategy and implementation approaches from my “UX Playbook” that can also help you be more successful.
ENDNOTES
* UX Org design: Alternatives to the Hybrid platform-product UX organizational model might include A. fully distributed teams, which leads to inconsistent UX for the end user, lower morale for UXers stuck in silos, and ops inefficiencies from duplication of effort, or B. fully centralized teams, which suffer from excessive bureaucracy and lack of designer domain knowledge. There are other models- check out Peter Merholz’s excellent book ‘Org Design for Design Orgs’.
** UX Helps Make Money: The most-cited industry research on the positive business impact of design was done by McKinsey in 2018. The report analyzed the design practices of 300 public companies over five years. McKinsey correlated the strength of a company’s design practice to its financial performance; the top 25% of design-led companies increased revenue growth by 32% and total returns to shareholders (TRS) by 56%. Companies with top-quartile McKinsey Design Index scores tracked 10% annual growth and 21% TRS, vs. 3–6% and 12–16% for others
*** UX Helps Save Money: A 2018 study by Forrester on the economic impact of investing in “Design Thinking” at IBM found that IBM’s design thinking practice had $48.4 million in benefits versus costs of $12 million over three years, an ROI of 301% ( Forrester: The Business Impact of Design: Five Best Practices for Measuring It. By Gina Bhawalkar, May 14, 2020 (A Design Impact Series Report). A similar 2018 study by on the economic impact of investing in “Design thinking” at IBM found that IBM’s design thinking practice generated $48.4 million in benefits versus costs of $12 million over three years, an ROI of 301%. (“The Total Economic Impact of IBM’s Design Thinking Practice”, February 2018. Read the full study at IBM.com/design/thinking )
