About
As a Senior Product Designer at EZLynx, I had two roles:
- Individual Contributor
- Product Team Manager
Individual Contributor
The first was as an individual contributor on any project that had a customer facing interface. In that role, I worked with the Product teams and Developers following a designing thinking approach from concept to execution.
Step 1: Kick Off
Every product at EZLynx started either at the executive level or with a product manager.
Once a product manager had a high level scope, I met with them to understand their end goals or outcomes of the project and learn what they already knew e.g. pain points, users, feedback on existing products, competitors, etc.
Step 2: Discovery
After this, I collaborated with the business analyst for the project to setup user interviews, so we could understand the mental models and pain points as they existed at the time. I would then flesh out the user flows, personas, context scenarios, information architecture, and functional hierarchy.
Step 3: Ideation
The next step was ideation. This was the fun part and could take the longest. At this point, I would start mocking screens in ProductPin using reusable components from the EZLynx design system. I would usually go through multiple iterations of my mockups. After each iteration, I would review the mockups with the product manager, BA, and front-end engineer for the team assigned to the project and refine the mockups based on whether it wass feasible.
Step 4: Usability Testing
During the ideation process, I would work with the business analyst to contact customers and get their feedback. I would facilitate usability testing with the customer including setting up the usability test script, task list, prototype/mockups that the users will use and anything else needed to complete the test.
Step 5: Engineering
Once the business had signed off on the mockups, we would review them further with the engineering team to validate and surface any engineering concerns. Once engineering had approved the designs, I would continue working with them through the development phase, giving my feedback during sprint reviews, or further iterating on the mockups if the engineers ran into any issues that required changes to the mockups.
Design Leader
My other role was that of a Design Leader for the EZLynx organization. In this role, I worked closely with the Product, Engineering, and Marketing teams to maintain the design system and branding guidelines that the various teams use to build their deliverables.
Product
When I joined EZLynx there hadn’t been a Product person in the company in 2 years. The company had no design culture. Consistency and discoverability were huge problems. I had joined EZLynx with the hope of building a Product team and doing more user research and usability testing.
However, before I could do that, I had to establish rapport with the various teams. I had to build trust with Product and Engineering and convince them that I was their partner in solving the challenges they were running into and I wasn’t just there to draw mockups.
I started by applying the Product process to my organization. I interviewed stakeholders in the Product and Development team, including BAs, project managers, developers, and more. I then did an audit of the existing application and built an inventory of all existing controls, sitemap of the entire app, and the existing user flow. I then built a roadmap that would help me build a foundation from which I could then establish a design centered culture.
Product Team
I started by consolidating the product team on one design tool, ProductPin, creating shared libraries and reusable components that the team could use to build a consistent experience, and trained existing and new members of the Product team on how to ensure their designs were up to my standards.
I hired, managed, and mentored a small team of Product Engineers and Product Designers to help manage the increasing workload of projects. In my first year at EZLynx, I was easily managing anywhere from 5-7 projects in any given week. Eventually, with a Product team of three, each of us managed between 3-5 projects each. In addition to managing the Product team, I also acted as the Product project manager, and helped to manage the Product team’s project schedule.
Guiding Principles
To help onboard new team members to the EZLynx way of doing things, I created a Product Field Guide that described how we did Product at EZLynx, and the guiding principles that underpinned the EZLynx product design philosophy (see below).
The product team lacked easy access to user analytics. They had to depend on IT or engineering to build custom on-demand reports, and those reports were only available to the individual product manager. I wrote a business case, evangelized for, and helped roll out FullStory as a user analytics platform that would allow anyone in the Product team to easily view user analytics and understand how their products were doing.
Engineering
One of the problems with Engineering was that there were almost a dozen development teams scattered between two offices in Dallas and Bangalore, but only one front-end engineer. Consistency was a major problem. Developers would build new features and components even if there were existing components that did the job, and each new component had a different look and feel and behavior from the ones that were developed previously. As an example there were 6 different components to upload files into the system, when one would have sufficed.
I built a design system for the engineering team and acted as an advocate for the front-end engineer to any other team I worked with. I pushed for reusing existing components and an API-driven approach, instead of duplicating functionality.
Marketing
The existing brand had become stale by the time I had joined EZLynx and was no longer adequate to handle the new products that were being developed. I worked with the marketing team to completely overhaul their brand guidelines and built a new one that was designed to be more scalable and work better with the product.