Summary
The talk highlights the challenges UX functions face when integrated later in fast-growing enterprise companies, using SmartSheet as an example where UX was established after many years. It emphasizes the necessity for all employees to adopt a design thinking mindset, making user experience everyone's responsibility rather than just the UX team’s. VB Rosenstein from Zendesk explains how she scaled a global UX research practice by streamlining processes and increasing credibility. Vasilio Sampalis from LEGO describes a combined top-down and bottom-up approach to enhance user-centric maturity that gained notable industry recognition. Jackie Ho from VMware discusses strategies to maintain alignment and accountability across multiple scaled teams while preserving their autonomy. Collectively, the speakers provide actionable insights and methods that help organizations keep the user experience cohesive and high-quality despite rapid growth and product team multiplication.
Key Insights
-
•
In enterprise companies, UX is often an afterthought, making it challenging to embed user-centered design deeply.
-
•
Scaling UX impact requires adapting processes to support growing and multiplying product teams without losing quality.
-
•
User experience responsibility should be distributed across the organization, creating a culture of design thinking beyond just UX professionals.
-
•
VB Rosenstein successfully scaled Zendesk’s global UX research by adding rigor and streamlining workflows for greater credibility.
-
•
Vasilio Sampalis implemented a top-down and bottom-up approach at LEGO to increase user-centric maturity with visible success.
-
•
Jackie Ho focuses on balancing team autonomy with alignment and accountability across numerous UX teams at VMware.
-
•
Rapid company growth requires UX managers to continuously rethink team organization, process scaling, efficiency, and experience coherence.
-
•
Experience risk fragmentation when product teams grow in silos; UX teams must mitigate this to avoid disjointed user journeys.
-
•
Building a design-thinking army across disciplines helps to democratize decision-making around product and customer needs.
-
•
Each stage of growth presents unique UX challenges that require tailored strategies to maintain maximal impact and quality.
Notable Quotes
"Imagine if everyone you worked with, regardless of the role, had deep empathy for your customers and made decisions based on those customer needs."
"In the enterprise space, the UX function is added later. It's not part of the company's original DNA."
"By the time the value of a human-centered process has been proven, UX is often outnumbered."
"How do we scale our processes, maximize efficiency and quality, and keep the experience from getting disjointed as teams multiply?"
"User experience is everyone's responsibility, not just UXs."
"We need to create an army of design thinkers across the organization who can make better decisions on what to build and how to build it."
"VB Rosenstein scaled Zendesk’s global UX research practice, adding rigor and credibility while streamlining processes."
"Vasilio Sampalis’s top-down and bottom-up approach increased LEGO’s user-centric maturity and attracted Gartner’s attention."
"Jackie Ho shares how to keep teams accountable, aligned, and autonomous after scaling UX practices."
"Each stage of growth brings different UX challenges that require new ways to organize, process, and influence the product experience."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Holding on too tightly to insights and controlling data flows can make research teams irrelevant."
Jemma Ahmed Steve Carrod Chris Geison Dr. Shadi Janansefat Christopher NashDemocratization: Working with it, not against it [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
July 24, 2024
"Designers are rebels; to get their buy-in, involve them and treat them as precious collaborators."
Nina JurcicThe Design System Rollercoaster: From Enabler and Bottleneck to Catalyst for Change
October 3, 2023
"A pattern library is not a design system — you need the code as a single source of truth to prevent people dropping the ball."
Nathan Curtis Nalini P. Kotamraju Jack Moffett Dawn ResselDiscussion
June 9, 2016
"Key Experience Indicators gave us rigor to bring into engineering conversations to make design less vague or fluffy."
Saara Kamppari-Miller Nicole Bergstrom Shashi JainKey Metrics: Comparing Three Letter Acronym Metrics That Include the Word “Key”
November 13, 2024
"Don’t forget the critical change agent persona — adoption and success was determined by the admin or practitioner users."
Malini RaoLessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey
June 9, 2021
"Stakeholders often have strong opinions; our job is to back decisions with solid, evidence-based data."
Mackenzie Cockram Sara Branco Cunha Ian FranklinIntegrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live
December 16, 2022
"You can change the time zone to whatever works for you on the conference site to avoid ambiguity."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
June 9, 2021
"At first, teams felt like they stopped everything just to prepare for the growth board."
Jackie HoLead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards
January 8, 2024
"Uber incentivizes drivers to be on the road waiting for passengers, which adds to congestion."
Dan HillDesigning for the infrastructures of everyday life
June 4, 2024