Great UX Design Takes a Village

If your product team is like the ones that I’ve had the privilege to be a part of, optimal UX Design and Product Design results typically are attributed to the design team’s efforts within your product organization. While there is no denying that design and research teams should ultimately bear the responsibility for positive user experiences and product design outcomes, there has been a noticeable observation that I have made throughout my years working in various startups and agency organizations. 

Startups and entire product organizations that are centered around user needs and business goals and that have a clear north star metric and roadmap that connects all of their efforts are far more likely to build great digital products versus teams that work in departmental silos with no clear feature generation and prioritization logic and no clear connection between current ticket requests and a big picture north star metric. 

Great products are achieved by an orchestration of departmental (product, engineering, design, and research) processes that are guided by user needs and business goals. There is an acute awareness of user wants and business goals that is front and center throughout every ticket, sprint, and roadmap initiative. 

Oftentimes product teams think of good design as the thing that will make up for our product teams inefficiencies and will clean everything up with new updates to the UI. And while a good designer can do this for a while, it will oftentimes be short lived, as digital experiences are too complex and interconnected these days to just throw some paint on it and all of the user experience issues will magically go away. The best designers, product managers, and researchers understand that great user experiences are created by a well orchestrated team anchored by user needs and business goals, and will work to put methodologies in place that increase the entire product team's ability to learn about their users wants and needs and empowered to consistently deliver on those learnings.