Guiding principles
Building a great product starts and ends with your end user.
Users come first, it's that simple. All of the good intentions, effort and brilliant engineering that go into creating a product is judged through the perception of the person using it - the user experience. Is it intuitive? Is it solving a user’s actual need? How does the user feel after working with your product?
Speaking with your users regularly will guide you to their actual unmet needs. They will uncover the soft spots are in your product, in your competitors’ products and possibly in the market as a whole.
Product Design begins with understanding your user’s needs, and finding solutions.
Leadership
As a people leader in the UX field I approach my role as a guide and a resource. In my 20+ years in user experience I have had the benefit of working for and alongside some truly impressive people, and I have internalized the best of their examples along the way.
It is my responsibility to model good work practices and challenge my team to push further than they expect by setting goals high and then helping the team to meet them.
I believe that a good leader ensures that each team member is growing into their next role while supporting them to excel at their current one.
At the same time, a true leader also helps their partners in Product and Engineering to grow their UX skills, and demonstrates how good UX practices can be easy to implement.
My leadership results are borne out by data: in my last organization’s employee engagement survey, results from my direct reports were 10-15% higher in all categories than the org overall. This was in an organization that itself had good results, rating consistently above benchmarks for similar companies.
