Something that’s top of mind for me, when it comes to establishing a mature UX team, is traceability: How is the team doing? Who is doing what? Is the team’s output’s at the quality it needs to be? The challenge with managing and tracking these things is you need a simple process that doesn’t require extensive manhours to manage and is also easy and obvious to use and understand. Finally, it also has to scale effectively to support a team that may not be centrally located.
The approach I’m setting up, both for myself and the broader UX team, is to track both strategic initiatives and team efforts in two different ways. For strategic initiatives I’m setting OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and for tracking day-to-day work I’m using a Kanban board, borrowing process elements from the Agile SD methodology. Let’s cover each, in detail:
UX OKRs
According to Wikipedia, “Objectives and key results (OKR) is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes.” Originated by Andy Grove when he was running Intel, OKRs allow a team or a business unit to have a shared set of goals and targets that can be managed and evaluated on a regular basis. The “Objective” can be anything but it has to be measurable – Hence the “Key Results” part.
Here’s an example of an Objective for a UX team:
“Define personas for Product A to inform product features and support empathy and understanding among the cross-functional team.”
There can be more than one Key Result for that Objective. Some examples.
- “At least 20 interviews to inform persona creation”
- “At least five relevant representative personas are defined based on the data captured through user research”
- “The personas are leveraged on a monthly basis by the product management team to inform decisions”
- “Personas are shared with the broader company as a case study, to increase in interest in UX and user centered design”
- “At least one team outside of the immediate product team, will see the impact of the Persona work and request such work be done for their product.”
You can see that there is both a tactical and strategic aspects in these sample Key Results. The tactical – delivering and using the personas – supports the immediate need of the product team to have “empathy points” when it comes to defining and designing features. The strategic – sharing the work as a case study to encourage additional teams to see the value of the work – supports the broader team and the overarching goal of increasing the wider organizations “UX maturity.”
Each Key Result can be measured numerically or by percentage complete. When drafting these Key Results, focus on impact metrics – KRs should not be just a list of tasks to be checked off. Additional, “stretch” KRs can also be added to any Objective.
It’s about making sure the goals and expected results are obvious and all team members are aware of them. It also supports reporting to management both inside and outside the team.
Another thing to be encouraged is collaborative definition of OKR details – this will result in the team members feeling a sense of ownership for the effort, and in my experience this results in a higher likelihood the Key Results will be achieved (or surpassed).
OKRs aren’t just for projects. We are also looking at this as personal goals, aligning them to the SMART model of quarterly reviews and performance. Here’s an example OKR I’ve set for myself:
Objective: “Become known as a Thought Leader in UX throughout the larger Enterprise”
Key Results:
- “Present about UX at two internal events.”
- “Present about UX at two external industry events/conferences.”
- “Write one internal company blog post a month about UX.”
- “Reach out to one team a week to promote the UX team’s capabilities and value.”
UX Kanban Board
OKRs naturally lead to projects and tasks. How to track such things on a daily and weekly basis? A Kanban board.
A Kanban board is a visual representation of who is doing what and what status the work is in. It originated in Agile teams, but the simplicity of this method allows for easy updates and visibility. There are also numerous free or low-cost Kanban boards that can be used online, which is perfect for distributed teams. I’ve used Azure Devops Boards and Jira Kanban Boards in the past – I prefer Jira, though.
(A free Kanban Board you can play with is available at KanbanTool.com).
A typical board has four sections: Backlog (or “Waiting”), In Process, In Review, and Completed. The Kanban board we use for the UX team is aligned with the typical design activities that we do.
- Intake (Backlog)
- The backlog of new requests that comes into the team (from other groups or internally generated)
- Discover
- Any research that might be required (either meetings with stakeholders or with users)
- Design
- The actual task(s) of designing the experience or creating the design artifacts
- UX (Internal) Review
- Peer review with other UX team members – User testing is set as a task at this stage (or Discover, if it’s formative testing)
- Business (Stakeholder) Review
- Review of the UX work with stakeholders
- Handover/Closed
- The packing/completion/delivery of the design work
The great thing about this approach is there is no “definitive” status list you have to use in your board. You can refine it to align to your design process, in the spirit of Agile. Daily standups allow the team to know who is working on what and we can update status of the board in real time (both in that meeting and throughout the day).
It’s not rocket science, but having these two processes in place helps the team manage expectations, message status, and know what their marching orders are when it comes to the “big picture” stuff. Try something similar with your UX Team, you may find it “scratches” a particular itch.