Team management

As a people manager, I bring a sense of humanity to complex technology by nurturing collaboration and celebrating the unique talents of each designer. On a strategic level, I foster meaningful partnerships across Design, Product, and Engineering to position my global team of designers to drive business value and provide a customer-centric enterprise software experience.

Project #1:

Roles &

responsibilities

Creating clarity in ambiguity: Roles & responsibilities

Problem: After a significant departmental restructure, designers were navigating a new organization without role clarity. This led to ambiguous responsibilities and collaboration challenges.
Solution: I defined and implemented two resources to define roles across the team: a team structure document and a RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed).

Outcome: The team received clear expectations around individual responsibilities, which established stronger cohesion, efficiency, and collaboration.

Learning: As a manager who newly entered this product space, I talked with all team members to develop an understanding of existing roles.
Identifying: Through several exploratory conversations with my direct reports and adjacent designers, I identified what was working well in terms of responsibilities and what the challenges were.
Team overview document: I collaborated closely with the team’s other UX leaders to define and document the team structure, including how each team function contributes to success.
RACI model: I led the creation of a RACI model, in collaboration with the UX leaders. The RACI model is a granular resource that puts our team overview document into context, defining specific tasks and the level of involvement each role has in those tasks.
Presentation: I created a presentation to communicate both the RACI model and our team overview document to the wider team, in partnership with my manager.

Alignment: I extended this effort to other UX groups within the UX Design department, enabling several managers to create RACI models for their respective teams.

Project #2:

Strategic

connections

Building stakeholder relationships: UX strategic planning
Problem: UX team leaders were conducting meaningful conversations with various stakeholders across Product Management and Engineering. However, these conversations weren’t documented, shared, or synthesized. This led to missed opportunities for identifying UX impact areas based on those conversations.
Solution: Collaborating with the team's UX leaders, I led an effort to define a plan for intentional, meaningful stakeholder connections. The plan covered who connects with whom, as well as steps for using gathered insights. I implemented a practice for everyone to start documenting and sharing their conversations, and I used Gemini to identify strategic themes. Those strategic, cross-stakeholder priorities informed our UX focus areas.
Outcome: The UX designers were positioned to drive the highest level of business impact as a result of stakeholder insights and strategic prioritization.

Stakeholder map: I mapped Product Management and Engineering points of contact across the product ecosystem. I identified existing touch points and gaps.
Connections outline: I outlined the current state of stakeholder connections and the ideal state. I worked with the team's UX leaders to determine who should meet with whom, based on our leadership pillars: Manager, Technical Team Lead, and Architect.
Documentation & initial themes: I had everyone conduct their designated stakeholder meetings and use Gemini to document notes from each conversation. I ran all notes through Gemini to pull out strategic themes.
Patterns & recurring topics: After several conversations, we had a collection of strategic themes across stakeholders. I ran all the themes through Gemini to surface patterns and recurring topics.
UX areas of impact: Combining those topics with existing user data, we created a list of potential opportunities and narrowed it down to the top strategic areas where UX can drive the most impact.

Assignments: Key team members were assigned to work on the strategic focus areas.

Team management

“Abi has been a fantastic partner to collaborate with. During the RACI review, she excelled at fostering communication between us through Slack messages and meetings. I appreciated her open approach to our alignment discussions, which effectively bridged any gaps.”

— June Zhang, UX Design Manager