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Mike Leary

Product Design Manager Interview

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How it all began

Beginnings

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Developer Communication

Agency Years

Stakeholder

Management

Business

Problem Solving

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Why?

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Rebuild and Grow

Two years in the making within the mobile app space. Leadership, growth mindset and strategy from a UX Lead perspective.

While thinking about the last 2 years within the mobile app space I wanted to tell the story of ux as a strategy and a philosophy. How we need to adapt and adjust and refine… just like we do within our process we need to do the same with our team and our approach. This story is based in the realm of working for a fortune 70 company and taking the helm on one of the biggest focuses of the company… the mobile app. How do we influence our product partners? How do we build trust within and outside our teams? How can we keep UX in the forefront without having to kick out the other legs of the stool? How do we solve problems instead of creating them?

I want to break this project up into two chapters…

Chapter one is the rebuilding of the mobile app team and the creation of the Safeco mobile app

Chapter two is the growth of that team a year later.

I will then wrap everything up with my work within emotional intelligence and I was able to harness the skills which make all this work possible.

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Making it all work:

Rebuilding an app and a team

Chapter 1

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3 main focuses for a healthy team

Involvement

Investment

Trust

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Design

Session

Value Matrix

Collaboration for the “what” to build
Show alignment between all 3 legs

Roles and Responsibilities

Set expectations and create transparency

Ideation

Crazy 8’s and Whiteboarding sketching to get everyone visually involved

I created a full day design session that would involve all members of the team to really help ideate in true UX fashion.

I walked through role and responsibilities to make sure they all knew who I was and how we would work together. I really wanted to set out expectations and transparency
I then worked the team through a value matrix exercise which allowed all team members to plot the most important features in the Safeco app and what type of work it would take to get it accomplished

This session was also to show alignment. Product had a vision of what features they wanted to work on so after we completed the group value matrix we held up that product vision to show how aligned the team actually was.

After aligning on features we did a quick crazy 8’s and whiteboarding session to get everyone’s thought of the app out on the table.

The response from the team was amazing! It really brought a fire back to the team and really set us up for success moving forward.

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Design

session

artifacts

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Something to work with

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Next Steps

Roadshow

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In with

the new

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More strategy

Working smarter not harder

Less work

There is a little more strategy that needed to be tucked into the overall process for the Safeco app. It was an underlying theme we had in the back of our minds and now that we were in the high-fi stages it was time to really lay out our plans.

Let me give you some background… When we started the Safeco app we had the plan that we would circle back and redesign the sister company’s mobile app as well (for Liberty). The idea we came up with was to utilize one platform but being able to toggle back and forth between either design system would help distinguish between either brand. This was to help keep a common flow and elements which would help drive consistency when representatives of both companies needed to speak to one or the other of the apps.

This would also help push 3 main business goals… simplicity, consistency and speed to market

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One App, Two Brands

Co-branded UI delivers brand-specific data & functionalities to iOS and Android users

The Solution:

20% time saved for Dev

Flexible Architecture

SIMPLICITY

Co-branded UI

CONSISTENCY

50% time saved for UX

SPEED

Accelerated Development

50% time saved for Dev

Simplicity - By simplifying the architecture as we built out the Safeco app we projected the developers would be saving 20% off their time when we needed to kick off the Liberty Mutual app.

Consistency – by having a co-branded UI, anytime the design team needed to make updates or create new features that would only have to do them once. This approach was the backbone for the project and helped drive the growth of the design system which I will get into later

Speed – In regard to shared features it also applies to development. By designing and then developing shared components it allows the devs to only have to develop once for both brands.

It was a fun approach and really made for tight collaboration between all legs of the stool. We had to design alongside the devs to make sure we were designing elements they could build and that were flexible. At the same time we had to working tightly with product to allow this work be done and that it would align with their roadmap.

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Safeco

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Liberty Mutual

So as you can tell from these mocks our approach was pretty simple…

Utilize common elements and keep the user at the fore front. By making small changes in the styles it helps us harness the full power of the shared common components from the design system. It was really successful and gave the devs a clear roadmap of what their next steps were while building the Safeco app and then transitioning back into the Liberty Mutual app redesign.

But like most stories… there are always bumps in the road…

As we wrapped up the Safeco app development and progressed towards the new Liberty app… time had passed and our design system had matured quite a bit… which it often does in product design creation.

Since everything was on one platform we felt it was time to make these new designs system changes now so that both apps would be up to compliance.

The question is how do you provide value for design debt and also align with developers on what needs to be updated?

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The only constant is change:

Managing Complexity

Chapter 2

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App 2.0

They always come in threes…

Process

Onboarding

Influencing back-logs and creating value for design debt is never an easy task.

Introduction of 2 new team members that I would have to handle completely remote.

New external process and revamped internal process.

So let’s break that down again… updated design system, onboarding 2 new team members and regrouping on process all while we are learning to work from home in a pandemic!

App 2.0 – which is the new insertion of the design system and the ever interesting challenge of communicating design debt to product. I will walk you through the success we found in working with our team and helping to influence the product backlog

Onboarding – which encompassed the introduction of a new team handled entirely remotely. Which was obviously something no one in the company had encountered. So I was really trailblazing on that front!

Process – which was the breakthrough of our new external process and the solidifying of the internal process I had established for the Safeco app project. New team means updated process!

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App 2.0

The growth of a design system

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Here is the level of detail we provided for product and devs when we delivered the MVP documentation. We worked closely with the devs to align on how exactly the templates would work and how they would like them to be implemented. By creating value in other areas other than design you allow opportunity with your product partners. I found it eliminates the personal aspect and focuses the developer and we brought it back to the user by stressing the consistency.

Now that all the stories are written and refined the devs can pick and choose in regard to when the implementation can happen. It was a good bit of work on our end to create value but it made that conversation so much easier with product. It comes back to the outlook that we are all on one team… and we just need to act like it. We are all responsible for the product and the impact on the business.

Mural Board link: https://app.mural.co/t/libertymutualux8235/m/styleguide5406/1599158685614/99e7fdae14a97fa13b2dd2640db738e099116d7a

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Onboarding

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Knowledge

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Internal Process

As the team grew so did the details on how we were going to work. I wanted to be sure we took our existing process and worked as a team to redefine it to really drive collaboration.

I also wanted to create transparency throughout the portfolio of how the mobile team grew and visually show them how we work.

We landed on a 4 stage process with the top three phases about the work we do internally…

Phase 1: Requirements and Alignment

Phase 2: Wireframe and content

Phase 3: High-Fi Mocks

Phase 4: Is our internal process for creating mural boards for transparency and getting files set up for dev communication

Testing obviously occurs at the end of phase 2 and 3 and can be adjusted in regard to what information we need to find and test. My focus is always around solving the problem at hand and not creating more.

Phase 4 is where we really concentrated our efforts in the next stage of execution

Mural Board: https://app.mural.co/t/libertymutualux8235/m/styleguide5406/1602020400131/5a309d8541d10c61c0fa548306c5fa1a0604c5e4

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UX and Dev

Process

As you can imagine with growing a team remotely and managing the complexity of 3 distinct dev teams we hit a bump in the road in regard to communication with the teams.

Each team wanted to communicate differently, and we needed to solve some glaring communication problems. So what did we do… we Uxed it. We parsed out a process that was existing and revisited it internally within ux and then brought the full dev team into the fold to wrap it all up together.

On top of formalizing that updated process we lay out a plan of tool structures and expectations moving forward for full transparency. I even created a tutorial pdf on how to use sketch and Zeplin in case new developers came into the team or the existing members needed a refresh.

All this information was captured in added into the teams confluence board. Now our entire process, how we communicate and why we communicate is documented and free for the work to check out!

Confluence Board: https://forge.lmig.com/wiki/display/MOBILE/Mobile+Apps+UX

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RightTrack

Designs

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Emotional

Intelligence

Empathy, collaboration and thought leadership

I wanted to tie this case study up by ending with the underlying theme of emotional intelligence and thought leadership. All of this work could not have been accomplished without the work I put in to really help drive emotional intelligence throughout the team and the portfolio.

I’ve spent the last 2 years focused on team unity and how we could better drive that emotional intelligence. From facilitating the DiSC personality workshop to creating my own emotional intelligence program called ”A Round of Pause” I’ve doubled down on how to better drive collaboration and create empathy within teams. By explaining and defining core values I wanted to help co-workers see what drives each member of their team and how we can all communicate better. By defining those values and then understanding that pause we need to take, we create a more inclusive and healthier working environment.

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We are all on one team…

let’s act like it

My Philosophies

Our job is to solve problems,

not create them