 user experience teams in different disciplines and in startups versus more established companies. So we'll talk a bit about the need, how to discover the need for what's needed in the business, how to build out the team based on those needs, and how to scale it either within the company in one locale or globally. And then most importantly, once you have found and attracted your top talent, how do you retain them, motivate them, elevate them within the companies? So at least in these three companies alone, SAP Ariba, PayPal and Intuit, Anjali and I have collectively about 30 years experience in these three companies alone doing this this thing. But what I'm curious from you today as a show of hands, how many of you are tasked with hiring a new team, a new user experience team, any of you? Yeah, from scratch? How about scaling an existing team? You were a new leader brought into an organization, you have to figure out what's going on and assess the talent, yeah? And then how many of you may not even be in the user experience field but have to actually hire user experience professionals? Okay, so we've got a few folks of everything. So we'll try to touch on at least the highlights, you know, as Anjali and I were preparing this presentation, we figured out we could probably end up with a six hour workshop or longer on this. So we're going to try to touch on at least the highlights of these and will be available for questions and such later on. And after this is well. So discovering the need. So as you are a new leader or an existing leader in an organization and you need to hire user experience professionals, one of the first things you need to understand is what are the business needs? Because your user experience people have to understand what that is. And the business needs can come from many different places. I would say that you wouldn't just stop at the product management organization to understand roadmaps or the technology organization to understand the technology choices and engineering requirements. But you need to also work with the sales organizations, the marketing organizations, the customer experience organizations, customer support. You need to be on a road show. Talk to all of your parties and all disciplines to understand what those business needs are because each one of those groups might have different pieces of feedback or insights for you. Only after you understand all of that, then you start to understand who the users are. Depending if you're in a consumer organization or in an enterprise organization, your users are going to be drastically different. If you're in a startup working on consumer software or games are going to be different types of audiences than you are in an enterprise company. So from SAP Ariba, when I joined there, it's an enterprise software company and they do procurement software for large organizations. What I started observing by talking to again my colleagues listening to customers is that we were talking about the users as the people who were buying the software. Actually what we found out was that the users were in two different camps, the choosers and the users. So the choosers were what everybody was focused on. The CXOs, the high-level executives that were spending millions of dollars buying software. What they forgot to include in the user research were the actual end users. The people who had to actually use the software that these people were buying. And if they weren't using the software, those folks who made the purchasing decisions were not successful. So we had to understand the dynamic between these two groups of people who had very different needs within the organization and start advocating and bringing in those end users, those lower level employees into the research and into actually very high level executive meetings so that dynamic between those two groups of people can be recognized. So you really need to understand who your users are. And then only after you find out what the business needs are and the users need are can you start to think about well what do I need in my organization? What kind of skills do I need in my user experience organization? There's functional skills and then there's soft skills. One thing that we started to hear over and over again at SAP or Reba after I started was users were frustrated. The choosers and the users. The CXOs and the end users. Your content reads like code. I don't understand this stuff. You're not speaking in my language. What this led for us was there's a functional skill gap in the user experience team. There were no content writers, no content designers. What was actually happening was that engineers, well being, well intentioned engineers were writing the UI text, the field labels, the button labels and all of the error messages. But they were writing them in ways that made sense to them. But there was not a lot of customer involvement to figure out what does it mean for the business. So we had to hire and bring in writer professionals to be able to go through systematically and define content styles, work with users to change that content over time to be much more friendly and in ways that people understand. So you have to start to understand what the functional skill gaps are. Also there are soft skills that you have to consider. Soft skill gaps that I also found that we also found. As an example, add into it right now, something that's really important in our organization is not just having designers who can do great design work. But designers now have to be able to speak in business sense. Being able to advocate for the end users, speak in terms of ROI, use data in metrics to advocate for why this design is better than that design. So the soft skills, being able to be a collective partner at a business table, have constructive debate, bring up things that may be counterintuitive. Those soft skills are very, very important now within an organization because the designers are no longer ones that are just doing design work. They are advocating for those end users. And they're having to speak in terms of ROI to get the business needs met. And then after that, figuring out what it is in your team that you might need. Now, we have found that there are five main types of skills needed in a user experience team. User research, interaction design, visual design, content strategy, and then last but not least, which is a linchpin to a lot of it is a producer. So you have to see what you have as you are inheriting a team or you're starting a new team. What skill gaps or things you need to augment in your organization? And I would say that, you know, if you're starting a new team, you're most likely going to find an interaction designer or a visual designer, and potentially after you have more people in your team might you need a producer. Now, I use a term called a unicorn or a purple unicorn, unicorn or a non unicorn. In an organization, you're going to eventually need both. Let me explain a little bit about what I mean for that. If you're in an organization where you have scarce resources, you're probably going to want to find non unicorns, jacks of all trades, people who can do multiple jobs, all different kinds of user experience skills. You might use that also in startups where you have only a few designers, people who can manage to do a little bit of everything and do it pretty well. However, as your team starts to scale, you might want to start to consider what a unicorn would bring. A unicorn is someone who has deeply specialized skills that raise the craft of your organization, raise the craft of the product, meaning designers who are versed in motion design, icon design, people who have great skills in content writing for international use, people who are in-depth user researchers or ethnographers. So as the team starts to build out, you might want to start adding a few of these other specialties to your team whose sole job is to work on those things but work across your organization. And last but not least is leveraging the right skills for the right kinds of projects. So I'm going to turn this over to Anjali who can speak more to this and share a video that we have created in one of our past jobs to help illustrate the role of the different user experience disciplines in a storytelling passion. Thank you, Michelle. So right skills and right projects before I move into the video, I just wanted to share a case study rather it just so happened that at PayPal when I was there in around 2007, I was managing the visual designers, global visual team based in San Jose. So one day as I was walking down the aisle, I just turned around and looked at the team. The team was made up of seven designers all from different countries speaking on an average to languages. And I reflected on that because you realize that you do need diverse skills on your team. As you're localizing your sites and as we were doing that, we started to consciously align designers from certain locales because one, they understood the nuances of the locale, as well as they could talk to the stakeholders. We were launching Japan site and Japan market is a hard market to penetrate. And at that point, we had our product marketing managers as well as the product managers saying that we need a design team in Tokyo. And we did not have the budget for that. So we assigned a designer from Japan who was on my team to work with them and that the product was amazing. They were happy, happy customers, as well as the users. It did not look like somebody in the US had designed it. They thought it was somebody in Japan who had designed it and thought through the colors and the nuances. So as I'm trying to play this, I'll need some help. We were all looking at within our team. This was SAP Ariba. The video you're watching is copyrighted for the storytelling, the theme and the presentation. So we had a challenge. Anytime you went into a meeting, they would say, Oh, just give us one designer and we'll go and watch them. This story illustrates the various disciplines of the SAP Ariba user experience team and how they work together with other teams towards the outcome. A great customer experience and customer delight. Let's use the analogy of opening a restaurant and creating a delightful dining experience. Meet Mr. Jagdish. Mr. Jagdish has come from India to settle in Bloomsdale, Pennsylvania. One day, he and his friends are chatting in their local bar. There's just no Indian restaurants around here. One friend comments, I am very much missing my mother's cooking, says another. Then Mr. Jagdish comes up with an idea. What if I open an Indian restaurant for everyone in the area? Mr. Jagdish decides to spearhead the whole project as the product manager. His friend Basanti, who has excellent organizational skills and is great at keeping tabs on everything, takes on the producer role for the project and starts pulling the UX team together. She assesses scope, identifies key UX disciplines needed to get the job done and encourages ongoing cross functional collaboration throughout the project. Ultimately, removing roadblocks and ensuring that the project stays on budget and on schedule from start to finish. With the UX producers help, Mr. Jagdish starts working with the user researcher to understand diners current behavior, challenges and preferences to inform the design. The user researcher observes people dining at local restaurants, conducts interviews and researchers best practices in restaurants design. She identifies what types of people dine at Indian restaurants, couples, tourists, children, grandparents, vegetarians, food and so on. Then she creates a persona to represent each type of diner. With the help of the producer, Mr. Jagdish also partners with the interaction designer to design the restaurant and the dining experience before handing over the blueprints to the product developers for construction. The interaction designer and the user researcher collaborate to design different dining concepts that they can get feedback on from potential customers. They also touch base with the developer to ensure that their design can be built. They consider lots of different information. For example, how many people do they expect to dine at the restaurant? What would be the best method of distributing this fine Indian food? A food truck? A sit down and eat stall restaurant? A drive through? A delivery only? The interaction designer designs the user experience based on customer requirements and preferences, industry best practices of great dining experiences and business needs. The producer makes sure that the interaction designer then partners with the visual designer who focuses on the restaurant brand personality through the use of imagery, color, shapes, typography. To enhance the experience, the visual designer takes many other visual cues like signage and icons into consideration, as well as the menu design, making sure it's legible, neatly formatted and reflects the brand through the use of logos, iconography, images and fonts. Meanwhile, the producer ensures that the UX content strategist is collaborating with the researcher and designers from the get go to create a great experience. The content strategist looks at the user's experience of content through the entire restaurant and creates customer engagement and delight through words and language. She works with the marketing team to understand the restaurant's brand personality and then defines the style, voice and tone of the restaurant content, making sure that it reflects the brand. Her goal is to create customer engagement and delight their empathy. She makes sure that everything a customer reads during their experience at the restaurant focuses on what they care about and what they need to know. Once the restaurant has been designed, the designers share everything with the developers who work in collaborations with the five UX disciplines to build the Indian restaurant on time and according to Mr. Jagdish's requirements. Together with product development, sales, brand, legal and marketing, the UX team and Mr. Jagdish collaborating to create a delightful customer experience. So what do you think? How many disciplines in UX? Five. So this was part of our education we were trying to do. And then what it helped us with is understanding the way people were, the perception of how our stakeholders were looking at UX, the key functions, calling it out and also using it as part of our on-boarding. So we use this video for our on-boarding, for our new hires and also for interns so that as they start working with our cross-functional teams, they could be our evangelists and ambassadors. So how do we scale? And Michelle did mention about, you know, looking at what's out there, what are the business needs and what are the gaps. It also, for geo-strategy, what we looked into is organizational maturity. Is the geo ready for a UX team? Actually, it started with that conversation when I was at PayPal. We had a central team in San Jose. EMEA, LATAM and APAC did not have any UX teams. So what we started looking at is, is there a local, global and a local? So the local team is a core team. If you're thinking about a hub and spoke model, it's the core where you have a local team where all the key functions are there, the five key functions, mature leadership, and then going global, how do you go about that? With global, what we started seeing is in the market, many a times as you're penetrating into a new market, research becomes very key, understanding your market needs. And with research, you do need a hybrid, perhaps, a UI and a visual designer who can work with the product managers and come up with some prototypes and test it out in the market and validate it. So starting off in phase one, you would have that blended designer, a researcher, and the content here is content strategist, which potentially could be your localization content writer. So because you are going into a localized market, you do have localization team there. So we leverage the localization team and then eventually how we started to expand the team is augmented it with contractors or agency staffing. In phase two, as the organization matures, the market demands increase, localization of their websites, the product, the features come up, all the staffing models replicate what is in the local. So you have this model where you have the hub and spoke maturing to a point where individual hubs can spin off and become their own core. So how do you come to that? How do you decide when is the time to do that? What we had to think about at PayPal was is it a centralized model or is it a decentralized model? And same thing with Ariba and in different variants there too. So what we had done was it was a core centralized UX team. The head of each of these UX teams were reporting into our VP of design in San Jose. So the purpose of that was the experiences were consistent. The brand experience was not diluted if you had local teams which were on their own. And the standards and systems were across the board pretty much same. But we did give Liwei about 20% to the market, locales specific to your needs. How do we, you know, make it local specific, tune it to that voice and tone. So overall the experience was from the same brand. You felt it was the same PayPal brand and the designers you could not tell whether the designers were in US or in the locales. It felt like it was one company brand voice experience being delivered to the users. So from there, from scaling to global as well as local and there's a term which I use, global. So global usually happens. We all are in that world where budget is always a play in our hiring, right? So if that is the situation, then the model which we used was we would tap into our core team and have few local designers. So it was kind of shared resourcing as well as making sure that we had some augmented staffing. So the burden on full time head count was not there. Last but not least, the right culture. Culture is key and keeping it fun. Teams which have a lot of fun get things done, right? Yeah. So that is something Michelle with her leadership and as many of us who support the team, we always make sure you have to gel the behaviors. It is so hard, especially with designers and a lot of us are designers, some with big egos, small egos. So how do you play that? So when you're hiring, hire slow, hire smart, because you're not hiring for now, you're hiring for potential and growth. So think through that and always think infuse the team with the right culture of empathy so they are not scared to fail. Even if they fail, they feel supported. Transparency. So they look up to you and they know you're a leader who can be trusted and they can always come back to you. And then design, bring the design factor into the play so that it's not an art. Hey, make this beautiful, make this pretty. Have you all heard that when you're designing? All the time. So design is business, right? So we have to deliver to that business. So make your designers feel they're empowered and they are. We make an impact to the business and have that ROI in mind which Michelle mentioned. So with that, we will open it up for questions. Distributed agile in UX. So for us, we don't have that in at Intude, but at other places we have done this. We have to make sure that you have this producer role is very key in the locale if it's distributed, if it's globally distributed so that you have somebody working with our cross- functional teams there. And the other thing is we also have to be thinking about UX being one story before. Like a story zero is where UX comes into play. That pretty much sums it up and that I'm not chill, I think so. Yeah. That is a difficult thing, especially if you're inheriting a team and a team, I would say a team that's a collection of individuals versus a team that works as a team. It takes a little while for trust and some people may not be happy at first because they're wanting to work on their own. They don't want to share their work. And it becomes about, you know, when we're hiring new people for the team we may choose very deliberately to pick a different cultural fit and then that starts to infuse. Specifically for me the way that we like to work is no ego. I would rather find someone who has the right team fit, the right one group that wants to share, that collaborates, that has that curiosity to learn, and then coach some of the design skills than to hire someone who has great design skills that are going to be like the bull in the China shop and not be able to collaborate with all those other disciplines because it is a collection back and forth. So it's about looking for the right new talent, forcing almost, having, you know, several times a week design huddles, teaching through learning, having that safe space to work, and doing a lot of fun team things like getting to know each other, journey lines, lunches, and try to start to build that culture. What else would you like to offer? When you're actually looking at teams across nations or across regions as such, there's a sort of competitiveness that builds up, but however, how do you make sure that competitiveness doesn't go into a negative channel as such? So you're talking about globally distributed teams and the competition between the teams across different regions. So one is competition is healthy and I'm glad you pointed out negative, how do you not? So that's where you have to have the right leaders in place. And if we think about our principal designers and strategists as leaders, not just having a manager title, but it's everybody, everybody on your team is a leader. So the culture becomes into play a lot here and what we have to do is make sure that you have to come out of it and zoom out and think we're all part of this big team. So that's the design huddles and being very inclusive is very key to that. Another thing that can help with that is to work on a shared project globally. So you're doing something as a collective versus pitting each group against each other. So that that kind of helps to break down those barriers. And one more thing on the fun part of collaboration. We did a blanket making project. We started in San Jose came to Chennai. So it was for hospitals. So getting your teams involved in community also and it's the same cause globally that helps