Working with teams at different levels of UX maturity

I’ve found that while most UX leaders are familiar with the concept of organizational UX maturity, not everyone knows how to get their team to that next level of maturity. As an organization builds out the UX function, the UX team may have strong capabilities in interaction design, visual design, user research and analytics, and UI development, but the rest of the organization may not fully understand how to leverage these capabilities. 

For the UX teams I’ve led, the approach that has worked best is to engage with each product or project team based on that team's working style, increasing the level of integration between UX, product management and engineering when the team is ready for it. In a couple of organizations, we've created a benchmark scorecard to assess the maturity of each team. We are set up as a centralized UX team so that UX leadership can provide guidance to the designers and the teams we partner with, rather than embedding designers fully in teams where the leadership is not familiar with UX best practices.

Some product teams may be looking for more of a consulting model where they bring in UX to provide user research and design for upcoming features that will be implemented in the future. We work towards a more fully embedded relationship where the designer participates in agile team planning and works with skilled UI developers embedded on the team directly but that doesn't necessarily happen at the beginning of the relationship.

Another way to drive UX progress with a product team is for our UX team to self-manage a UX discovery project to highlight opportunities the product can take advantage of, and then work with the team over time to map these opportunities into the product roadmap backlog. Maintaining oversight over the UX design and research resources enables us to prioritize formative user research to clarify the needs, wants and top tasks of our target user personas so that our recommendations for enhancing the experience are grounded in data. 

Strong UX leadership can set up designers for success in a variety of different circumstances, whether working with a team that has experience partnering with designers effectively, or instead working with a team that does not know what to expect from the UX designers.

Building a community at work

One thing I enjoy about working at Duck Creek Technologies is how we share our personal interests at work. Being a remote first company, it is not always easy  to get to know people and build relationships personally , so we make an effort to support that through our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), our Be Well initiatives, and encouraging social time before and after work-specific topics during meetings.

I am an active member of the Live Music community where we post updates, photos and videos about concerts we've attended or performed in. It's a great way to break the ice in group meetings when I recognize someone from the Live Music community I otherwise might not know. 

At a time in the pandemic when most of us were spending more time at home, I had the opportunity to put together a webinar about how to use GarageBand for anyone interested in music production. I did a demo of building a composition track by track with a basic introduction to music theory and some tips and tricks. We are an insurance software company, so music production isn’t a work-related topic, but it turns out there are dozens of fellow employees who showed up and were excited to compare notes about music composition and audio production. It was an enjoyable creative outlet for me to put together a training session that would appeal to novices as well as folks who were more knowledgeable, and I found there are many more musicians at Duck Creek than I realized.

Enabling employees to share their personal passions can be a great way for people to feel more at home, get to know their peers better, connect with others with common interests, and provide opportunities to make small talk and regular social connections. I know it's helped me to connect with my peers and made me a happier employee.