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Starting From Scratch:
Building a UX Practice

Starting from
scratch
How do you build and grow a UX team within your organization
where none existed?
How to you nudge an organization towards making data driven and
user driven decisions?
Team building

The story of my ongoing
successes and failures at
building a UX practice.
I’m a little nervous…

Hello!
I’m Ari Weissman.
Currently
Sr. Director UX & Community @ Crownpeak
3.5 years
Previously
10 years helping large organizations shift towards a
user-centered design process

My organization… Crownpeak provides an enterprise-grade, cloud-
fi
rst, Digital
Experience Management (DXM) platform allowing Fortune 2000
companies to deploy and optimize digital experiences. It is the
only DXP that includes Digital Quality Management (DQM) and
Governance & Privacy (DG) tools.

What I walked into
• 3 very junior (but awesome) designers
• Engineering driving product decisions
• No data (qual or quant)
• Misaligned incentives
• Poor product design
The state of design

6 areas of focus
Where i started
Design
Principles
De
fi
ne a
Toolkit
Evangelize
UX
Broadcast
Outcomes
Advocates
& Partners
Listening

6 areas of focus
Design
Principles
De
fi
ne a
Toolkit
Evangelize
UX
Broadcast
Outcomes
Advocates
& Partners
Listening

Listening
My
fi
rst challenge was understanding the current state
• Design team
• Product organization
• Product Experience
• Organizational Incentives

After the first month…
Lessons Learned
Identify the unspoken /
unknown pain points
Take off the rose-tinted
glasses

6 areas of focus
Design
Principles
De
fi
ne a
Toolkit
Evangelize
UX
Broadcast
Outcomes
Advocates
& Partners
Listening

Design principles
• What does a UX team do?
• How should we measure success?
• How do I excite the team about change?
I needed principles that were broad enough to
provide
fl
exibility for the team while focused
enough to start driving better behaviors.
Creating direction

Design Principles
1. Consistency
2. Data Driven
3. User Focused
4. Be a good partner
5. Iterative problem solving
6. Experience beyond the UI

Setting design principles
Lessons Learned
Talk about progress, a lot. Create time and space for
trial and error
De
fi
ne the problem. Let the
team help de
fi
ne solutions.

6 areas of focus
Design
Principles
De
fi
ne a
Toolkit
Evangelize
UX
Broadcast
Outcomes
Advocates
& Partners
Listening

Defining your toolkit
Our goals required tools.
Some was knowledge and some technology.
Some we had. some we needed.
Tools and Skills

Be User Focused
I got this.
PLAN EXECUTE CAPTURE
Build vs Buy
ANALYZE

Defining your toolkit
Lessons Learned
Tools are more effective
when they are used cross-
functionally across an
organization
Technology helps enables
good practices, but does not
create them on its own
Create space to focus on and
practice with the basics when
teaching new skills

6 areas of focus
Design
Principles
De
fi
ne a
Toolkit
Evangelize
UX
Broadcast
Outcomes
Advocates
& Partners
Listening

Evangelizing UX
We needed to change how the rest of
Crownpeak thinks about the design UX team
• We’re more than design
• We’re more than make it pretty
• We should be the front end of the process,
not a jira work
fl
ow step
Sharing the gospel of design

Talking about change
We needed to change:
• the way we work
• the way we work with other teams
• the way other teams work
Evangelizing UX

Evangelizing UX
Lessons Learned
Find frequent opportunities to
share and celebrate the
outcomes and value of
collaboration. Talk about the
behaviors you want to repeat.
Talking about UX never ends.
It needs to be ongoing
discussions and education.

6 areas of focus
Design
Principles
De
fi
ne a
Toolkit
Evangelize
UX
Broadcast
Outcomes
Advocates
& Partners
Listening

Broadcasting
Outcomes
We talked about what we want to be
We needed to start showing what we can do
Quickly show the value of the change
Talking about outcomes

Broadcasting
Lessons Learned
Create opportunities for
public conversations about
data and design.
Just because no one replies
doesn’t mean it’s not
valuable.
Be a better storyteller.
Why does this information
matter to you?

6 areas of focus
Design
Principles
De
fi
ne a
Toolkit
Evangelize
UX
Broadcast
Outcomes
Advocates
& Partners
Listening

Advocates &
Partners
I don't want UX initiatives.
I want organizational initiatives
Teamwork

Advocates & Partners
Lessons Learned
?
Advocacy is easier than
partnership.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/

Where are we now?

Thank you!
Any questions?
You can
fi
nd me at @travelingre or on Linkedin.