Championing UX During a Company Merger

Show Your Value

“As a long-time member of the technical communication community, I have heard this lament literally for decades,” responds Mike. “So excuse me if my reply sounds a bit crabby or battle weary. Don’t teach people how you add value, show them. If your value isn’t evident as they work with you, ask yourself whether you truly are adding value. This means understanding the problems your immediate team is trying to solve and focusing your skills and contributions on those problems. Avoid their perceiving the UX presence on a team as one more hurdle developers need to overcome to get their job done.”

Adrian agrees, “Don't teach. Demonstrate. Find something, no matter how small, that you can fix that’s going to help the organization. Beg, borrow, or steal the resources to get it fixed. Document the improvement in the bottom line.

“Workshops and talks are nice—but nothing convinces people better than a little hard evidence. You can then leverage your small win to get the resources to do something else. Once you start delivering value on a regular basis, the conversation about the value of user experience to the organization becomes much, much easier to have.”

Pinpoint Specific Examples of Success

“My experience is that this won’t be the last time this happens to you,” says Steven. “The first time this happened to me, I was at the apex of getting along perfectly with everyone—from the newest developer to the legal team. Then, they outsourced the whole IT department and turned much of the organization upside down. But, even aside from catastrophic changes like mergers and reorganizations, you’ll have to work with new vendors or teams who may have, at best, a vague or misleading impression of what you do. 

“Try to analyze what you did to prove your value before. It probably didn’t actually mean taking months or years to prove yourself on project after project. But proving the value of UX probably wasn’t a steady upward climb either. You’ll likely find that certain specific examples and explanations and certain specific types of successes helped jump the department from one level to the next.

“You should be able to focus on these—whether they were process improvements, success measures, or demonstrable ROI calculations—to shorten the UX adoption cycle for your new organization. And of course, leverage those working across the organization—from executives to business analysts—who already recognize the value of user experience enough to sing your praises without your even asking.”

Educate Your Organization About the Value of Good Design

“As a manager of a UX team myself, I can certainly relate,” says Baruch. “One thing that I have learned to be invaluable is always to remember that you must not only manage down, but manage up as well. There are always opportunities to ensure that peers and senior management are aware not only of what you and your team are doing, but also the value you are providing. Explore opportunities to conduct learning sessions, during which you can share both the particulars of the types of activities your team does, as well as some of your accomplishments.

“I find that there is a decided lack of UX professionals within an organization who make sure that people know exactly how much value user experience brings to a project. If you’ve saved thousands of dollars on a redesign or increased user adoption rates by some percentage, people need to know about it. In most organizations, specific groups have weekly or monthly team meetings. Identify the groups you need to influence most, and find out whether you can spend 10 to 15 minutes of their meeting time talking about what your UX group does and how people can get you involved in their projects. Chances are that they will relish the opportunity to have you speak to their team, because most of these meetings are starved for topics. If this type of forum is not available, record a short, interactive Webinar, and post it to your company’s collaboration site. Then advertise it through email to let people know it is there.

“Luckily, general knowledge of good design is more prevalent—even if the term UX is foreign to people. This allows us to relate the value we bring to the design of gadgets and consumer applications that people use in their everyday lives. Instead of getting deep into the disciplines, language, and activities of user experience, at this point, you really need to educate your organization about the value of good design. And your team is perfectly poised to provide that value. Good luck, and remember: educating people about user experience is just as important as practicing it. A little time invested in evangelizing the value of user experience goes a long way.”