Google recently launched it’s NFC-based payment solution, Wallet. For a company like Google, strong in engineering but less so in design, Wallet was a particularly risky product to build. You can’t half-bake the design of a consumer payments product. It has to instill absolute confidence among its users. Workflows have to make complete sense with [...]

As startups grow and succeed, employees with no management experience are asked to become managers. Some dread the opportunity. Some relish it. But all ask: “how do I get started?” A few high performing designers and researchers – and freshly minted UX managers – at Google have asked me this recently, so here are a [...]

Most of us know the story.  You start your career as a front-line designer, researcher, coder, or writer.  You love what you do.  You love being a part of the process of making new stuff.  Or making old stuff better.  By some random series of events – some might say misfortune – someone eventually suggests [...]

I’m delighted to be teaching a 3 hour workshop at Adative Path’s Managing Experience Conference. Here are some of the materials I will be distributing at the event: Leadership Cards Exercise Career Planning Worksheet Design Job Ladder Leadership Planning Worksheet Personal Mission Statement Templates Performance Assessment Journal Margaret’s Prioritization Tool Graham’s Project Queue Tool Team [...]

In August 2008, we conducted a workshop at Adaptive Path’s UX Week in which participants formed teams to solve key problems faced by UX team managers. Following is a rough summary of the output of one of these teams.   Manager? Leader? Which am I?However canI succeed as both How do we go from being [...]

We’ve been a little slow in responding to our great session at UX Week in San Francisco in August.  In our 3-hour journey to create a user’s guide to managing UX teams, our brilliant participants agreed on a list of UX team management issues to tackle.  We started them off with the first four chapters:  [...]

Anyone who knows Margaret knows that she loves haikus.  As she says, they’re the original elevator pitch – a fun, yet powerful way of concisely making a point.  They also make a great ice-breaker at a “managing ux teams” workshop … and that’s what we did last week at UX Week, where many brilliant haikus [...]

We’re still recovering from our fantastic session at UX Week in San Francisco last week.  At the session, we set out to create a user’s guide to managing UX teams, and our intrepid participants didn’t disappoint.  They collectively agreed on a list of UX team management issues to tackle, brainstormed best practices for each, and [...]

How am I doing?  Most managers aren’t able to answer this question, and the ones that can are delusional … or, if they’re serious about improving as managers, they’re surveying their stakeholders, including their team members.  And it’s not just about determining how effective you are as a manager, but how effective you are for [...]

We’re all too busy working on projects to spend time arguing about whether people are low performers, high performers, or rock stars in-the-making.  Right?  Wrong.  You don’t need to run a survey to work out that, when team members get feedback and coaching on their performance, they’re happier and perform better.  But we do, and [...]