Organizational Strategy

A “level up” in design.

With COVID-19 devastating the travel industry and driving the need for remote work, investment in design ops became critical. We engaged with an airlines company to rethink the strategy for maturing their design team operations to ultimately increase retention and employee satisfaction.

Overview

We created a future state operating model and roadmap to increase design maturity, increase processes efficiencies from design to development, and increase net promoter score.

Time frame
2 months

My Role
Lead UX Strategist, User Researcher, UX Designer

Activities
Within my team was a Project Director, Business Analyst and User Research Manager.

Tools
Sketch

01 Current State

Stakeholder Interviews

We conducted various cross-discipline stakeholder interviews within their digital organization to understand the day-to-day and painpoints of those working within and impacted by UX. We found the following overarching themes:

Inconsistency and inefficiency of UX resources, process, and tools
Confusion of UX role and progression
Overutilization of UX resources

“We're trying to train leadership to come to us with problems they want to solve. vs “here’s the feature we want to roll out with, on this timeline.”

— UX lead

“There was a lot of rework towards the end, because a lot of things weren't thought through at the beginning.”

— Business analyst

Process Mapping

We charted an end-end flow of how a request travels from discovery to delivery and mapped points of friction. As we uncovered during stakeholder interviews, the ways of working differed within each team, so we kept it as general as possible and conducted follow up interviews to validate our findings.

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Operating Model

By the end of our currents state assessment, we had a sense of their current operating model as it relates to people, process, and tools.

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Maturity Model

We leveraged a maturity model provided by Invision: The New Design Frontier, an industry-spaning report from 2019 that identifies the relationship between design practices and business performance.

This study uncovered five natural levels of design maturity, with trends showing those that operate at a higher level can see direct impacts design efforts to business outcomes.