Establishing an Enterprise UX Community
Background
Like many companies in 2020, John Deere was in the throes of a digital transformation (oh yeah, and a global pandemic), heavily focused on upskilling software engineers and incorporating agile practices to product development. And--unfortunately also common--no strategy around how to design or actually make good products.
Around this time, the our IT organization realized that a shared-service UX team of 10 people couldn’t support the hundreds of products and 3,000+ engineers in its domain (shocking, I know). A handful teams began hiring their own UX positions, and it was one of these new product roles in the Dealer space that I joined as the sole UX-er supporting 3-5 teams.
There were 12 of us “Product UX” folks spread across half a dozen departments (many as a team of one), but we’d been given no guidance on how we might be effective with our teams. A friend in my design network wisely advised that, if the Enterprise wasn’t going to support us and provide opportunities to grow, we’d need to rely on each other and do it ourselves.
And so, in Summer 2020 and fresh off of being sent to work-from-home, I invited a dozen UX professionals to yet another Zoom call so we could try to figure out exactly what we wanted our “community” to be. We called ourselves the “UXplorers.”
Starting Out
Without any shame or irony at all, I kicked off our first meeting by sharing a definition I’d googled of what it actually meant to be a Community of Practice:
Community of Practice (CoP): A group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, 2015
We at least knew our Domain: Product UX-ers, and I knew from other company guilds that the Community part usually was a Lean Coffee-style meeting. I figured the “Practice” part would figure itself out eventually.
As I facilitated the brainstorm around what we wanted our Community to be, I realized that a Lean Coffee was going to be too little, too bite-sized for sharing knowledge and helping each other learn.
Our biggest challenge as UX professionals was that we didn’t know how to navigate this weird new space of working with agile teams without sacrificing rigor and product quality…that wasn’t something we could discuss properly in just 5-10 minutes.
Lesson 1: Learn how other Communities work, but do what makes sense and leave what doesn’t to keep it useful for the people who want to join you.
By the end of the brainstorm, we had some Community Goals (below) and I had a follow-up meeting with two other folks willing to figure out a better, non-Lean Coffee format suited to us.
UXplorer Community Goals
- Get to know the other UX Product people (in both professional & casual contexts)
- Learn what others are doing (research, design, process, etc.) and use or adapt it for your own space
- Solicit and share feedback on work-in-progress
And so we kicked off the UXplorers Community, excited about the new people we’d met and hopeful for what was ahead.
Finding Our Groove
After our first few Community sessions, I started receiving messages from members about how much they appreciated that this space even existed. We were building something special: a place to hang out and learn from others in our profession, but without the stress of “job performance ratings” or the occasional competitiveness that can happen on Design teams.
What I hadn’t foreseen is that suddenly we all had access to skilled UX-ers with expertise in a range of areas: analytics, Scrum practices, front-end development, journey-mapping, quantitative marketing data, virtual workshopping...the list goes on.
Lesson 2: If you love learning, spend just 30 minutes listening to a peer share their real-world experiences on how they practice UX at your company. I guarantee that it's worth your time.
UXplorers began reaching out to each other after sessions to dive deeper or loop in product owners and developers. We started sharing the templates we’d all built for creating UX artifacts, now suddenly possible and quick-to-build in a way that was previously unreachable due to time constraints.
As more UX headcount got added, more UXplorers joined and others would introduce me as the person who “leads the UX Community of Practice.” I was uncomfortable with that title; in my mind, I was just scheduling/facilitating meetings and encouraging people to share their work. But one of the my close colleagues pointed out that we wouldn't be here at all if I weren't doing exactly that, so:
Lesson 3: Sometimes, “leadership” is just being willing to put in the time and make sure things actually happen.
Throughout this period, we iterated on our meeting format to keep us learning about our field and about each other. It was during one of our Zoom socials when we chose the name “UXplorers,” representing our shared curiosity and the unknowns ahead, complete with a design-workshopped meme for our group.
Looking Ahead
As of this writing, the UXplorers have been active and growing for just around a year and a half. I regularly have members who message me and tell me how grateful they are for the support this community provides, some of them calling it their “favorite meeting, hands down.” High praise for a Zoom call, but I can’t disagree.
In my recent end-of-year review, I spoke about how I’ve grown more as a UX professional while leading this group of people than at any point prior in my career. Some direct outcomes I had from sharing and learning in this group include:
- Getting buy-in for soliciting user feedback on low fidelity prototypes (a hard sell in an otherwise high fidelity organization) after sharing the success another team had in doing so.
- Mentoring a handful of junior and mid-level designers on presenting their work to others more effectively (and properly adapting to their audience).
- Led panels and talks on dual-track development to help others work more effectively with their agile teams.
- Learned how we might improve the way we collect user satisfaction scores; the changes I suggested resulted in a 34% year-over-year increase in response rate and an 84% increase in submitted comments.
We are just now beginning to look at that last piece of our Community of Practice: the “shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems” -wenger-trayner.com. And as we head into the next year, the UXplorers have added another goal to our list:
- Begin to understand how we might strategically grow in our careers
While I’m not sure we know how to do that today, I’m confident we’ll be able to figure it out if we move forward with the same curiosity and sincerity we started with a year+ ago.
The UX-ers in this group are some of the most impressive, smart people I’ve ever met, and I’m so grateful I decided to get us all together in that Zoom call a year ago. I’m a better UX professional for it and have also made some true, lifelong connections.