Ux lead experience

Growing a team

I’ve been very fortunate in my work experience to have been led and mentored by a few very influential people in my life. While each of them accessed the position differently, they were all consistent in terms of their: fairness, approachability, compassion, and desire to make those around them better. Much of my approach toward leadership I gleaned from their efforts, and in the time that I’ve had the privilege of leading our UX division, I’m proud that I’ve been able to emulate their effectiveness and at the same time, creatively championed new ways to motivate and keep teams engaged and empowered.

Below are some examples that highlight my Lead experience at NCM.

ux 3-year plan

When I was hired at NCM, there wasn’t an established UX Team nor was there any type of standard work defined as to how UX processes fit into the factory of designing, creating and publishing software. In the first several months of my employment, I balanced my assigned responsibilities with that of creating business plans to bring in more effective tools than were currently available, as well as re-defining their existing processes of software development that would include a stronger UX presence. Altering a culture is a large challenge, and I leaned heavily on the experience I gained at my previous employer when we implemented a similar change to a more focused UX existence.

I was very proud of what we were able to accomplish in my first year at NCM, and with the permission of my manager, I authored a vision for even further growth for our business, tailored to NCM. With the exception of only a couple of topics, everything in the below document was achieved!

DOCUMENTATION & training

With a strong passion for writing coupled with my UX influence, I’ve been able to comfortably carve out a side-gig as a technical writer throughout my career. Admittedly this activity isn’t really work for me, I genuinely love it. The below example is one of the latest documents I created after several complaints that an existing process was proving too cumbersome internally (naturally I offered first to re-design the process to make it more intuitive; that option wasn’t available at the time).

UX process

Shortly after I was hired, my manager tasked me with creating a quick document that he could surface to our Senior Leadership Team to provide a little more clarity regarding a UX Team’s processes and efficiencies gained. There were budgetary constraints for some of the resources that I was requesting and he was creating a business case to justify the costs. I’m proud to have contributed and even more proud that it was approved and that we were granted funds for the project.

Approaching user experience from the perspective of how it can and will grow business has assisted me immensely when pushing buy-in with people who may still be unfamiliar with what a UX focus can offer, other than just UI improvements.

unique user story creation

Translating UI requirements and matching them to the UI mocks/prototypes has always proved challenging for most teams I’ve been a part of. Years ago I proposed splicing individual UI screens with the accompanying UI elements (navigation, error states, active/inactive states etc.) and it was a method that was successful immediately. It’s a process I continued at NCM after I took over authoring the feature stories for our projects and the dev team really appreciated the extra effort.