01 Leadership Approach
There's a process each member of my design team follows to solve a problem for the business. First developing a deep understanding of their core business metrics and what's driving them including any key user or business context, aligning on the high impact problem to solve next, developing a vision and initial solution, and following up on learnings with further iteration.
As the Head of Product Design & UX Research, I check in on each of these steps to ensure the project is on track. But I often play a larger role in the strategic alignment on what problem to solve and why, as well as later on in finalizing a solution by critiquing and refining designs.
02 Design Principles
Designers on my team are expected to be deeply connected to the core business and user needs, question if we're solving the right problem, and utilize their creativity to deliver impact beyond a Figma mock.
I also believe in a highly collaborative design practice, with all Designers embedded in their cross-functional teams, pairing with PM & DS on strategy and vision, Eng on problem solving and execution, and PMM and Marketing on brand and UX cohesion.
03 Design Review
I've too often seen project teams and Designers lose themselves in the complexity of a project, focused on designing for constraints and edge cases, leading to fractured and unintuitive experiences.
When you live and breathe a problem for a long time, you can lose the forest for the trees. That is why, beyond a regular and inclusive design critique, I make time to do deeper design reviews on key initiatives.
In these meetings Designers wallk me through their thinking in more detail, and I probe as someone who has the strategy context but who is not overly constrained by the details. From there, I help designers see their decision-making through a more objective lens and better take on a new user POV to radically simplify and streamline the design solution.
01 Product Vision
The early years of Honor were spent building products to support a tech empowered but human-first approach to home care.
In 2020, Honor faced new challenges in care delivery with the pandemic. It was time to re-evaluate how we were leveraging technology and our high-touch operational team to deliver the best care to our clients.
Leveraging user research and data science, we began charting out a new vision to become more technology forward in our product approach. As head of Product Design & UX Research, I collaborated with our CPO in shaping our new product vision, then led the Principal Designers in creating concepts to illustrate this vision and inspire the product org for the road ahead.
^ Increased personalization and collaboration in our family app, leveraging ML and gen AI to guide onboarding and continued engagement.
02 Process & Ops
In 2023, Honor's product development org doubled in size. Moving from a small, in-office culture to a much larger, remote culture was difficult, on top of having so many new folks. I proposed and led an effort to establish formal product principles to drive clarity on what we value and empower the team to best deliver on our strategy and goals.
I surveyed the broad org to identify our gaps in alignment and understanding as a team, ran a design sprint with product leadership to align on 3 core principles and definitions, and finalized the documents and embedded them into our team rituals (stand-ups, all-hands, slack etc). These principles became a cornerstone for Honor's product culture and are still in place today.
Push for radical change with the product solutions you develop, to truly transform the aging experience.
Be bold in how you leverage technology to solve the biggest business or user needs. Explore the art of the possible, utilizing creativity and advanced technologies.
Take risks, and learn from being proven wrong.
Proactively seek out opportunities to drive us toward our goals.
Be curious. Stay deeply connected to the core problems of the business and users beyond just your project work.
Map problem spaces end to end before moving to solutions. Make sure you understand why now, what we know and do not yet know.
People’s security and well-being comes first.
Be deliberate in what users experience on our platform. Design for ease of use and simplicity, build for increased trust and confidence, and ship complete features no matter the size.
Be relentless in measuring the impact of your work. The goal isn’t to ship solutions, it’s to create the best possible outcomes for our users and the business.
Voraciously seek feedback on your work from all levels of the organization.
03 Process & Planning
In 2023, Honor's product org led a radical overhaul of our staffing approach—the core experience of home care delivery. Product Design and Data Science led a 'swarm' to improve key staffing metrics, designing and piloting a new algorithm and ops workflow to be later supported by new product tools.
In addition to managing and supporting the Lead Designer of this multi-month effort, I also spent time exploring and experimenting with our way of working in a swarm model (they had become the new norm). I revised our standard design process to drive clarity for Designers and replicate the success of the staffing swarm.
© Olivia Anderson 2024