The Top 5 Blockers to Building a Robust UX Culture: Part 2

Placing UX culture in traditional organizational hierarchies.

I began consulting in 1997. Diana died, Elton John repurposed Candle in the Wind, Jack and Rose were sinking on the Titanic, Buffy was on TV, and George Clooney was Batman.

It was also the moment when IT departments were moving from the basements and becoming an essential part of how we do business. They were still the guys that crawled under your desk and fixed stuff with a little flash of butt crack, the plumbers of your carpeted, cubicled, fluorescently lit world. They were also the people you called when you tried to download the Budweiser frogs to your desktop and crashed the entire enterprise internet server because it couldn’t handle a file so large. I’m probably not saying I did that. I’m certainly not saying that that freaking jerk middle manager Will with the pornstache did it at the Big Pharma company, who was my first client. But stuff like that happened. And IT suddenly became important.

I was an Accidental Consultant. That’s another story—the accidental nature of my consultant identity. But I won’t digress anymore.

Since then, my consulting has cut across verticals in the Fortune 500, non-profits, universities, health care providers, and multiple start-ups.

Even more recently, I’ve become interested in how companies are building (or failing to build) robust total experience cultures where none existed before. Writ large, the problems are problems of mindset. From my notes, I identified the five issues I repeatedly see, regardless of company size or stage of digital transformation.

1. Placing UX culture in traditional organizational hierarchies
2. Keeping UX separate from Agile transformation.
3. Allowing silos between UX and Engineering to form and become embedded.
4. Hiring the Wrong People
5. Not integrating UX with a strong Product IT Culture

Sometimes the traditional org chart can be a blocker to UX culture. I am not proposing that all orgs that want to do UX correctly must be “flat” (which can pose cultural challenges, too). However, the traditional organizational structure means that frequently metrics from business and technology leadership drive KPIs and guide solutions before they even reach UX teams. On the other side of the equation, UX culture has created a kind of animosity toward business operations, opposing mandates from business and technology power centers on principle stating that they interfere with user needs. Advocating for the user can sometimes become a zeal that won’t admit reason.

Mindset shift:

Magic erupts from matching user needs to business needs. That’s the sweet spot. We can’t force magic, but we can make the conditions hospitable to its arrival. How might we make this magic more likely to occur?

On the business side, the traditional hierarchy must include ways of working that gives the UX team a seat at the table. Keep those closest to the work and those closest to the end users closest to the decision-making.

For those of us in UX, we must use our UX strategies to drive business objectives; otherwise, how would any of us get paid? We are all in the room to make money for the business. The trick is not to exclude business because you think of them as opposed to user needs. To repeat: The trick is to lead in teaching the organization to match user needs to business needs. That is where the magic is.

Above all — -it isn’t about org charts and policies. It’s about power and people. Authentic power comes from genuine humans connecting to achieve goals together. Never treat another org — -Engineering, Marketing, Business, whatever — -as an opponent or adversary. Always think of them as human partners without whom you can do no good.