Understanding Experiences: When you have to do more than work
Summary
All of us work as part of something bigger, and we have a set of processes that allow us to make sense of our day-to-day work and its value context. What happens when you need to quickly grow and change, how to you understand those processes? How do you grow your understanding, internally, to improve your teams? First things first, you have to understand the processes and experiences that are going on right now. That takes research. So, let’s get meta.
Key Insights
-
•
Applying user-centered research techniques internally helps understand and improve team experiences effectively.
-
•
Diary studies combined with contextual interviews reveal rich insights into daily work challenges during team growth phases.
-
•
Internal personas for roles like product managers and Scrum Masters clarify responsibilities and pain points.
-
•
Service blueprints expose communication gaps and broken handoffs between internal and contractor teams.
-
•
Using scripts during interviews ensures consistent data collection and helps make participants comfortable.
-
•
Sharing service maps publicly invites team corrections and fosters transparency and ownership.
-
•
Defining skills gaps based on internal research allows recruiters to find better hires tailored to actual team needs.
-
•
Informal team rituals and ongoing communication across locations strengthen bonds and create a supportive work family.
-
•
Many organizations overlook researching their own internal users (employees) in favor of external customers.
-
•
Embedding empathetic conversations into weekly routines yields ongoing team insights and improves processes like onboarding.
Notable Quotes
"Are you really doing user centered teamwork when you're thinking about growing a team?"
"Talking to the people that I work with about the experience of doing their job in order to improve their job experience is probably the most overlooked skill set that we have."
"Do you have personas for the people that work for you? Do you use them to help define how your processes work?"
"You need to make sure that they’re comfortable and you need to do it with a script and representative users of your team."
"I do this in public, put this on a wall where you can test it so people can come and say, that is not right."
"Use these tools to define who you are going to hire next and what gaps those hires need to fill."
"The answers that they gave you are the questions you need to ask people you interview."
"Diary studies are fantastic when you're looking at growing a team and onboarding new people."
"The true problem was that two companies weren’t communicating, it had nothing to do with the UX team itself."
"We created a family by interacting with each other and sharing our problems with work and trying to solve them together."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"It’s about us, the design ops practitioners, and what we need today to be better at our jobs."
Bria AlexanderTheme Two Intro
October 3, 2023
"Creating space to name what we’re experiencing without guilt allowed us to unload some of that emotional weight."
Ariba JahanTeam Resiliency Through a Pandemic
January 8, 2024
"We tend to put the end user first, but we must also ask who we might be doing harm to beyond primary users."
Cornelius RachieruHandling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design
June 9, 2021
"WCAG does not apply to native mobile apps, which is how slow progress can be on this topic."
Megan Clegg Michael Haggerty-Villa Alexis MorinSpace for Everyone: Reframing Accessibility Through a Wider Lens
June 10, 2021
"When we don’t have the people modeling we need, we have to make it ourselves to lift the fog."
Saara Kamppari-MillerCartography for Design Communities
September 10, 2025
"The US digital service ecosystem has grown remarkably, showing we’re not alone in this journey."
Kara KaneTheme One Intro
November 16, 2022
"Nearly a third of the 65 mental health commission recommendations call for co-design, which is pretty exciting."
Natalia RadywylCo-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector
November 16, 2022
"If you put garbage in, garbage comes out – AI reflects the biases in its training data."
Nancy DouyonWe'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex
June 15, 2018
"Co-creation between users and technology determines if this AI evolves to be useful or harmful."
Peter Van DijckBuilding the Rosenbot
June 4, 2024
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What challenges arise from emerging AI tools that blur the roles of PM, design, and engineering?
What challenges do AI hallucinations present, and how should designers handle factual reliability?
What historical precedents can help us understand current wealth concentration and potential progressive responses?