Leadership is the capacity to transform vision into reality.
Adaptability
During my years at Verisk Analytics, I maintained consistent growth in UX customer satisfaction while experiencing major changes in work tasks and work environment.
Sustained consistent stewardship of ClaimSearch user experience during change management from a siloed waterfall work environment to agile scrum customer focused business unit.
Optimized production by leveraging UX team member individual strengths to maintain quality through multiple organization reorgs. During this time the team size fluctuated from to 1-4 direct reports servicing 18 development teams while overseeing 3 organizational rebrands
Planning and Collaboration
I like to use whiteboard sessions to cultivate that sense of collaboration between stakeholders and team members. In a virtual world, I often use Figjam or Miro to facilitate sessions. Some of my favorite exercises are:
Affinity diagram – this is probably the easiest to facilitate as it allows you to grab a topic that may be very fuzzy or unclear and build to group consensus on next steps
User journey mapping – this exercise is one of my favorites as it usually exposes a number of incorrect assumptions of our customers experience
Elevator pitch – this exercise is great to help get consensus on what we are trying to accomplish but most importantly how we communicate our objectives to customers
There are many other types of interactions but these are my top picks for collaborative activities.
Cultivating Excellence
I believe the most important factor in mentorship and development of talent is building a genuine trust and interest in seeing the positive growth in a designer’s career. I like to keep a bi-weekly touchpoint where the conversation is open to expression of how the designer is feeling in the workplace but more importantly what have they “seen” lately. As visually focused individuals, my experience is that the use of the word “seen” is great open ended question to gauge their specific interest (i.e. great new product, favorite website, funny new post, etc.). This share and exchange helps guide me to understand how to point them to next steps in their development.