Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution
Summary
Bloomberg's UX team is excited to share its 15-year evolution -- from employing UX as a new, innovative process to UX playing a central role in every part of the product development lifecycle. Ash Brown, Global Head of UX, will share how the company's UX team has grown and how it collaborates with its partners in Product. This will be followed by a panel discussion with two designers and two product managers who will talk about the different ways they've worked together. Bring your questions, because we’ll close with a Q&A session.
Key Insights
-
•
Bloomberg’s UX evolved through four phases: innovating processes, taking on special projects, embedding UX in product teams, and fostering UX skills across the organization.
-
•
Initial UX efforts focused on methodical user-centered design techniques like wireframing and storyboarding to reduce bias and increase value delivery.
-
•
Embedding UX designers alongside product managers and engineers leads to more strategic, continuous collaboration rather than reactive design fixes.
-
•
Product managers benefit from designers who ask curious, probing questions and are open to exploring multiple solution options.
-
•
Providing detailed context and understanding business goals enables designers to deliver more effective and relevant user experiences.
-
•
User research and usability testing are critical to validate hypotheses and inform product pivots before development.
-
•
Successful collaboration needs mutual trust and respect, treating UX, product, and engineering as equally important partners.
-
•
Healthy disagreements are constructive and should focus on shared outcomes rather than individual ideas or territoriality.
-
•
UX is not just about consistency but tailoring experiences to different platforms and user contexts, such as mobile attention spans.
-
•
Good design directly impacts business value by increasing usability, adoption, and customer satisfaction.
Notable Quotes
"Good UX is good business."
"If it’s not usable it’s not valuable."
"UX success equals team success."
"We are like three legs of a chair: product, engineer, and UX all contribute to stability."
"Curiosity and asking lots of questions helps push boundaries and improve solutions."
"Providing context to designers leads to much better design outcomes."
"Design needs to balance business strategy and technology limitations but always keep users centered."
"Healthy debate is key, and we should be biased toward a successful outcome, not our own ideas."
"It’s important not to fall in love with a feature but stay open to new information and feedback."
"Investing time upfront in user research and discovery avoids rushed fixes that don’t meet clients’ needs."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"We have to go from shipping a minimal viable product to creating a minimal lovable experience."
Maria GiudiceRemaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
June 9, 2016
"Use your UX skills to design better working relationships by empathizing with colleagues like you do with users."
Christian CrumlishAMA with Christian Crumlish, author of Product Management for UX People
March 24, 2022
"When you deliver MVPs without understanding the problem fully, you end up in endless cycles of fix-it-later and rework."
Rima Campbell Amrit S BhachuIncrease Productivity and Drive Business Impact
September 24, 2024
"Nothing about us without us."
Sam ProulxTo Boldly Go: The New Frontiers of Accessibility
June 10, 2022
"Design futures are not always in the future; sometimes they reflect constraints of budget, resources, or political will."
Victor UdoewaRadical Participatory Design: Decolonizing Participatory Design Processes
December 10, 2021
"A large organization’s security protocols make AI adoption slower and more complex than in smaller groups."
Jon Fukuda Amy Evans Ignacio Martinez Joe MeersmanThe Big Question about Innovation: A Panel Discussion
September 25, 2024
"Trauma is a rupture in meaning making; the way you see yourself, the world and others is shocked and overturned by an event."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSWTrauma-Responsive Design: Reimagining the Future of Design Now
December 10, 2021
"Momentum is great, but without a disciplined system, things will go back to the way they were."
Kyria Stephens Marlon KernerPower to Heal: Civic Design in the Aftermath of Tragedy
November 17, 2022
"Organizations are made of people — resilience is an outcome of a successfully organized group."
Niko LaitinenAdaptable Org Design for Resilient Times
June 10, 2021
