Digital Experience Transformation
Company
Wayfair
team
User Researcher, Designers, Engineering Lead, and Product Manager Leads
role
Associate Director of Experience Design
UX strategy • 2022
Overview
The Talent and Enterprise technology teams support Wayfair's mission to build best-in-class hiring and employee experiences by delivering solutions that improve hiring and employee efficiency and satisfaction.
Problem
Talent and Enterprise custom-built products and solutions have resulted in low adoption rates, user satisfaction, and return on investment. The teams that develop these products have historically had high attrition and low job satisfaction.
Objective
Lead a digital experience transformation across the organization that builds a user-centric culture, empowers teams with user insights, and delivers results that balance business goals and user needs.
discovery
Joined Wayfair, building relationships, and empathizing.
During my interview with the Wayfair hiring manager, I asked what the technology organization's most significant challenges were and how they thought this design leadership role would support them. In his response, he explained that:
The technology team had experienced high turnovers and reorganizations, which led to most team members having less than six months of tenure.
The entire design team turned over, including their design manager.
Solutions were developed quickly but only focused on a specific need without consideration of the holistic experience.
He was looking for a design leader to help transform the technology teams into strategic partners instead of delivery teams, build holistic solutions that consider the entire portfolio, and create consistent experiences with custom-built and third-party solutions. He had never managed an entire experience design function and needed someone to help build a vision for Wayfair's Talent experiences, mature design within the organization, and grow and nurture a design team.
A highly complex challenge and an opportunity to significantly impact the user experience and team within the organization? Sign me up.
Conducted internal employee research to validate assumptions and identify opportunities through interviews, workshops, and data.
When I joined, I needed additional context and data to help validate existing assumptions and identify the top organizational opportunities. In my first 60 days, I scheduled over fifty one-on-one coffee chats with cross-functional leaders, current and former experience design team members, business stakeholders, and executives. I aimed to understand their goals and experience working with our team and identify pain points and opportunities.
I facilitated a series of focus groups with new experience design team members to map out core opportunity area themes and begin brainstorming solutions. I also reviewed internal data on our employees, including eNPS, surveys, and employment data, to baseline our employee sentiments.
Afterward, we synthesized our qualitative and quantitative data and identified three organizational problems to solve:
Organizational Problem #1: Lack of user-centric culture
Business requirements drove strategic decisions such as creating new products, features, and prioritization without user insights and consideration of the impact on the user.
Organizational Problem #2: Product, Design, and Engineering Silos
Product and Engineering teams needed to learn how to collaborate with design and expressed confusion between roles within the Experience Design job family.
Organizational Problem #3: Low design maturity
The design team focused on tactical visual deliverables rather than being leveraged as a strategic partner to solve problems creatively.
Organizational Problem-Solving Approach: People, Purpose, and Process
My problem-solving approach involves framing and influencing three core pillars: people, purpose, and processes to transform and create value.
- People: Conditions that empower individuals to fully contribute their skills and problem-solving abilities. Encouraging leaders and individuals to reward and recognize each other based on their merits.
- Purpose: Clearly understand what our users value and how our roles support the user's goals.
- Process: Creating efficiency by standardizing processes, continuously improving, and ensuring measurable results.
Purpose
The team needed a clearer articulation of why our team existed, why our work was necessary, and what was our north star.
During my coffee chats and focus groups with the team, they clearly needed a sense of purpose and a north star. With this purpose, the team could articulate why it existed and why our work was essential to the business, cross-functional peers, and users.I facilitated several working sessions with my experience design team to collaborate, brainstorm, vote, and create our team's mission, vision, and values. Here are the results from our working session:
Mission: Empower all Wayfarians throughout their career journey by building world-class experiences that amplify their voices and cater to their unique needs while driving business results.
Vision: Deliver delightful, inclusive, and holistic experiences and solutions for all users we serve. Transform the Talent and Enterprise organization culture to allow user insights to inform our solutions meaningfully.
Values:
- Innovation: Challenging the norm and pushing the boundaries.
- Collaboration: Tight partnerships with our cross-functional partners.
- Voice of the user: Cultivating a culture of human-centricity.
- Data-Driven: Decisions driven by user research (qualitative and quantitative) and user analytics.
- Growth mindset: Learning from our users and other XD practitioners.
After we created our initial mission, vision, and values, the design team shared these with our cross-functional partners and peers. We included these in our team's presentations, read-outs, and team's confluence pages to build strong, consistent messaging on why our team existed.
Created objectives and key results for the organization to support our team's vision of building a culture of human-centricity
In support of our team's vision of transforming the organization's culture to be more user-centric, I created several organization-wide OKRs in partnership with design and my cross-functional peers to get alignment and commitment.
Here's an example: The objective is to "enable a user-centric continuous discovery culture across talent tech." Each team needed to interview at least two users per month for each product or experience they own. The entire team needed to observe or facilitate an interview session for each user persona we supported. The third key result was to build a playbook and process to support gathering users for our teams to interview.
The experience design team invited cross-functional partners to observe all user interviews and began hosting monthly viewing parties featuring clips from previous user research. The viewing parties allowed the teams to discuss how we address some of our user's pain points.
Adopted a design maturity framework, mapped the current level, and created milestones to advance to the next level.
The team needed a simple framework to explain the benefits of a mature design team and convey where design was today compared to other design teams across the company. I facilitated several working sessions to identify design maturity frameworks that met our team's needs, identified our current maturity, and milestones to reach the next level.
We shared our initial results with our cross-functional team to align the organization on clear behaviors and actions to create direction for the empowered teams.
Example milestone: Talent and Enterprise business leaders viewed the technology teams as tactical delivery teams. We rapidly experimented with real business problems by facilitating design studios and design sprints to develop concepts and validate with real users before spending any resources on the development. We shared these results with business stakeholders and leaders and shifted the paradigm that our teams could be strategic business partners with creative tools to answer complex problems quickly.
We prioritized user research initiatives on organizational roadmaps to co-discover.
Due to the lack of user insights, many of the organization's custom-built solutions failed to meet our users' needs. I partnered with our User Research Manager to identify high-impact and highly visible business problems to focus our limited user research resources. We created transparency by sharing key insights (as applicable) across the organization. Improved collaboration across teams by including cross-functional teams to observe research sessions live or asynchronously.
process
Cross-functional teams needed a clearer understanding of the design process, methods, timelines, success metrics, and expected outcomes.
Our cross-functional leaders came to me with a problem: They needed to understand what the design team was working on and what was involved in producing the desired outcome. From a design perspective, this led to challenges with getting unrealistic requests and misaligned timelines.
I created a 12-month design roadmap template for the designers to use to help build transparency and facilitate conversations with their cross-functional peers. The teams felt more confident in their agreed-upon timelines with their business stakeholders and better understood how much work we could take, how long efforts would last, and what was involved.
Standardized Design Thinking and Lean UX as our primary design methodologies
The organization needed a standard design methodology which made it difficult to build consistency on how design should work and the design phases to our cross-functional peers. The Global Experience Design Community adopted Design Thinking and Lean UX, which we leveraged because we wanted to be consistent with the standards across the company.
Results: Projects were more consistently run, and our cross-functional partners grew to expect a similar process for each effort.
Authored design method guides to educate cross-functional partners and standardize the way we work
While the design methodology helped our cross-functional peers understand the different phases in the design process, they still needed to learn the different tools and methods a designer could use within each phase.
The broader design community developed a confluence page with methods aligned by each design thinking phase. I and others on the team utilized a template and authored method guides so we could educate, share best practices, and standardize how we worked across teams.
Established design critiques, all-hands, flow-time, and retro's to support collaboration across design teams.
When I first joined, the design team needed more time to design for their projects, focus on internal operations, and develop their craft and skills. I partnered with our cross-functional leadership team to propose a consistent weekly flow time (focus time without significant meeting interruptions) that would work with the current sprint planning, demo and grooming ceremonies. On the design side, I partnered with my design team to develop a list of design ceremonies to help improve our team's overall output, share best practices, and work through team-wide challenges.
The result is the team felt like they had enough time to focus on their design work but simultaneously enough time to support each other, get their voices heard, and improve the overall team health.
I created a data analytics vision to empower teams with real-time user behavior data and feedback.
The team needed consistent user analytics to help make meaningful product and strategy decisions. Only some of the products were set up with Google Analytics or had a way to capture active or passive user feedback. The data we collected showed surface-level information, such as what pages a user clicked and how many times they viewed a page, but it didn't get us to the level deeper that showed us the "why" behind their actions.
Solution: I created a vision for gathering user data and partnered with Product Management leads and data engineering to build a business case to get our organization access to FullStory and Qualtrics XM. I partnered with other product and design teams to leverage enterprise licenses and implement the tool in our hiring experience platforms.
Standardized KPIs and processes to measure user experience performance.
The design team needed to show if we were making any measurable improvements through our efforts. I drafted a list of KPIs most relevant to our internal user audience and collaborated with the team to narrow the list to the ten you see here. The team consistently uses these measures in baselines and follow-up testing to show quantifiable results and return on investment.
Established three primary collaboration models for our designers to partner with cross-functional teams.
Since we were a small team, we could only commit to working part-time on some initiatives across our organizations. I established three collaboration models: embedded, consulting, and office hours to communicate in our roadmap the number of efforts we could work on full-time but still offer solutions to support other initiatives through part-time consultations or office hours.
This increased work/life balance for designers, set expectations with our cross-functional partners, allowed our designers to commit and deliver better results, and helped us communicate our project resource needs.
Created a design playbook to help onboard new cross-functional team members on how to collaborate with our XD team
Our organization needed a standard way to onboard new designers and cross-functional team members on how to work together with the design team. I created a Working with XD presentation (who we are, how we work, measuring success, etc.) as an onboarding tool for new designers and cross-functional team members. The result was a standardized onboarding of PMs and XDs, aligning on a singular vocabulary, promoting easier cross-organizational team-shifting, increased accuracy in XD project planning, and resource constraint visibility.
people
Lacked dedicated resources to focus on user problems, opportunities to connect with other designers, and time to manage their career development.
Developed a design team headcount strategy and grew the team from three to nine members.
In the last team, designers would flex between different portfolios and experiences, which led to conflicts over sharing resources and difficulty for designers to immerse themselves into the problem space.
At the beginning of the year, the Talent organization had two designers, and the Enterprise organization only had one designer. The ratio across the organization from designers to engineers was 1:20 and 1:2 for designers to product managers. I developed a design headcount strategy for both organizations to ensure we had enough dedicated resources for our flagship products and initiatives, junior and senior-level designers aligned to each portfolio, and re-introduced the content strategy role in our organization.
I collaborated with my manager and cross-functional leads to identify design resource gaps, review upcoming priorities, and align on role leveling. After receiving approval, I sourced design contractors to help bridge the resource gaps as I recruited full-time resources.
Invested in the team to learn and support their development
Drop Everything and Learn (DEAL) is a weekly one-hour time slot on every team member's calendar dedicated to learning. This allotted time means employees have the time and space to learn at work. Team members are encouraged to share recommendations and what they've learned with each other.
The program results showed that 85% of employees were highly satisfied with the DEAL program. 68% of employees felt that "having more time to learn at work" directly helped them learn more effectively.
Established monthly career growth meetings to help team members manage their own career goals
Set up meeting series to discuss, plan, and check in on my direct report's career and growth. Every month, team members would fill out a recurring growth meeting template to discuss career progression, what's been working well, and what needs to change, and provide my feedback. After implementing the program, employee survey results improved, with 76% of employees feeling "having regular career check-ins" helped them manage their career goals.
Monthly team building (optional) events, including contour drawings, solving murder mysteries, and food adventures
One of the drawbacks to the headcount approach of dedicating resources to a specific portfolio was creating design silos within our team. Designers would naturally spend more time talking and working with their partners in their portfolio, which meant less time interacting with designers outside of their portfolio. I set up a reoccurring monthly pod outing for designers and researchers to decompress, build relationships with others, and have fun. Here are some images from our completely optional events:
Moving the Global Experience Design Community mission forward
Wayfair's design leadership team founded GXD, the Global Experience Design Community, an internal community of Designers, Researchers, Content Strategists, and Operations teams. The goal of this community was to unite all the Experience Design teams across Wayfair to evolve each craft, establish high-quality standards, share design best practices, and grow the people on our teams.
As a leader within GXD, I encouraged my team members to participate in coaching and mentoring programs, tools collectives, craft-specific boot camps, event planning, and much more. My team members created the digital visual styles and helped plan the second annual GXD Connect. This full-day conference brought 180 members of our globally distributed Experience Design teams to the Boston headquarters to share, create, and have fun together.
results
Outcomes and impact from the experience transformation
Business outcomes:
- Increase in User Adoption: Monthly usage of new non-mandatory products increased by 56% compared to older products.
- Increase in Product Satisfaction: 43% decrease in the number of employees selecting their intention to leave the company in the following months.
- Stronger Cross-Functional Collaboration: Cross-functional teams have a more robust understanding of the design process, methods, collaboration models, and design efforts.
Team outcomes:
- Increase in eNPS Results: The design team's eNPS scores increased to +50 from a negative score of -10.
- Decreased Exit Intention: The percentage of employees stating their intention to leave the company in the upcoming months decreased by 43%.
- Design Team Headcount Growth: The headcount grew from three to nine in eight months.
