Summary
How do you establish a thriving UX organization in a century-old company? Our opening presentation is a tale of two organizations and two different UX leaders. They followed very different paths and come from different industries, yet their stories of success and lessons for others have a lot in common. Rob Mitzel spent his entire career at Ford, starting from a Safety Engineer and changing roles to evolve into a Design Ops Manager, as the company evolved. Sébastien Malo parachuted to CN (Canadian National Railway) only a couple of years ago, but has already changed the course of his organization. Rob and Sebastien compare and contrast stories of how UX adapted and iterated their teams, skills and service to meet the needs of an evolving enterprise IT organization and the business at large.
Key Insights
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Starting with a protective UX culture can hinder collaboration; openness and sharing usability patterns build trust and advocacy.
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Creating internal UX resources like a SharePoint site and in-person classes empowers both UX and non-UX teams.
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Building a component library that aligns with usability patterns effectively forms an early design system before the term was popularized.
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Transitioning front-end development responsibilities from UX to specialized teams allows UX to focus on core design and research.
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UX coaching embedded within Agile project teams helps raise UX maturity and enables basic design practices spreading beyond UX specialists.
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Clear team principles—expertise coupled with collaboration, advocacy, and healthy compromise—are essential for UX team success.
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Managing not only down (team) but also across and up in the organization is critical to expanding UX influence.
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Running facilitated workshops like persona and journey mapping on existing waterfall requirements brings clarity and reveals gaps, helping transition to Agile.
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Expanding UX into managing business analysis and process optimization integrates human-centered design with broader organizational goals.
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Building a UX alumni network by supporting team members’ career moves creates long-term design advocacy across the enterprise.
Notable Quotes
"My job was to insulate my team from the pressures of the project team and to not allow anyone else to do UX work."
"It was like publishing the family secret recipe; we feared sharing patterns could make us obsolete, but it was essential."
"If you see a need, fill it with a solution even if there’s no formal name or process for it."
"Be an expert, but act as a collaborator. UX is a team sport."
"Sell your vision to your team and close collaborators, but show, don’t tell, the rest of the organization."
"Sometimes you have to push a little and compromise to create a healthy tension that moves projects forward."
"Managing up and across means asking lots of questions and building your mental model of the organization."
"UX brought structure, clarity, and a fresh perspective on a known dataset by running user story mapping workshops."
"Expanding my responsibility beyond UX was not planned, but it helped further the cause of UX in the organization."
"You owe it to your organization and your team to keep growing the UX practice while staying true to your vision."
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