Getting UX back in the decision room
Here's how I re-established trust in UX in critical business meetings, brought UX goals back to the table and coached designers to advocate for the team to executive leadership.
Situation
When I first started leading UX at Login.gov, I attended a series of meetings with executive leadership to review key performance indicators and critical bets. Scrolling down the spreadsheet, I saw a slew of metrics tracking product success. A smattering tracked engineering goals. And tucked away at the bottom of the list? Three measly accessibility goals -- almost an afterthought, and at the bottom of the list, guaranteed to never garner much attention.
At the same time, my new reports told me that they often felt subjugated to product, their concerns secondary to those of their product manager's. User research reports went unread despite the immense effort put into them. As far as my reports were concerned, they might as well roll up to product, not UX.
Tasks
Clearly, UX had a seat at the table only in name. UX success rolled up to product success, and even the accessibility metrics, which tracked the number of accessibility tests run on our products, weren't very helpful. And yet, when I became Login.gov's UX supervisor, my reports imbued me with a hope that I would turn things around.
After taking time to do my due diligence and talk to a lot of people, I identified 3 main opportunities:
1. There was a mismatch in expectations between leadership and UX.
Leadership rarely had background on UX initiatives, from efforts to improve accessibility in our products to a full revamp of our design system. But at the same time, the UX org wasn't doing our best to evangelize these efforts. Leadership couldn't have understood our needs or goals even if they wanted to.
2. The UX team wasn't held accountable.
Anyone who looked at the three UX metrics we tracked would know that they were impossible to action on and challenging to interpret in any way that didn't imply they were vanity metrics. If UX wasn't held accountable, though, then UX would never be perceived as anything other than the people who drew pretty rectangles for other people's ideas. To show UX's value, we needed to develop metrics that could be actioned on and that UX could be held accountable to.
3. UX designers needed to advocate for themselves.
The team I supported was small, introverted and used to government work, with all the chains of command and bureaucracy that come with it. But recent hires in leadership and product came from the private sector, with "move fast" expectations and a sort of hacker "forget the rules" mentality. Unprepared for this change in culture, my reports dug their heels in, waiting for the chain of command to express UX needs to executive leadership, instead of starting from the ground up with their own teams.
Action
I knew there were gaps to fill, but I knew I'd only lose my team's trust if I chose to embrace a "move fast" mentality whole cloth. Still, I knew there were ways to increase trust in UX relatively quickly.
1. I piloted a weekly HPM report to showcase ongoing projects, evangelize UX wins and explain UX again from first principles.
Inspired by my previous experience at Meta, I started a short weekly e-mail to the leadership team and cross-functional leaders in the HPM format, which I knew leadership would be familiar with. This introduced leaders to UX in an informal way, laying the foundation for trust in the team. I also encouraged individual UX practitioners to write their own HPMs for their UX work, increasing their visibility in the organization and expressing the breadth of UX work.
Within a month, this practice became so popular that other teams adopted it to showcase their work to leadership. And within a quarter, another program within GSA took notice, starting an HPM practice in their program as well. Communication, it seemed, was a key issue in more than just Login.gov.
2. I led workshops to identify UX goals and the best ways to measure our success.
I had some hypotheses of what metrics would interest leadership, but I wanted to hear from folks in the trenches. So I pored through contact center tickets, user research reports and other artifacts, and gathered our designers to start brainstorming in FigJam. Sure enough, the people on the ground floor knew their products' ins and outs, and were excited to discuss WCAG compliance scores, drop-off rates and success rates.
Importantly, we positioned these metrics as companions, not replacements, for product metrics: we weren't about to make enemies, we just wanted to show our value.
3. I started coaching designers to advocate for themselves and their discipline.
In previous jobs, my company would subsidize programs like Toastmasters or other public speaking courses, which employees found helpful. However, Login.gov had no such resources. As an experienced speaker and presenter myself, I instead set up office hours for any member of my team who wanted to practice presenting to leadership, or even just at an all-hands. I would review the content of their presentations as well as how they were presented. More than grading charisma, I judged how well presentations were tailored to their audiences, and how effectively they made their arguments.
Though this perhaps was an unconventional duty for a UX leader, this practice led to not only better UX advocacy among the organization, but also to two members of my team choosing to present on behalf of Login.gov at conferences across the U.S. I may not have been Toastmasters, but I'm proud of this idea regardless.
Results
Through over-communicating to leadership, drawing up metrics and investing in UX's advocacy skills, my team and I made sure UX could confidently sit at the bargaining table.