2023 delivered some pretty intense headwinds for the Store and Fi teams — layoffs, re-orgs, strategy pivots — and for myself, it also delivered a significant scope increase as I shifted from leading one UX team to leading both the Store and Fi UX teams. With new leadership, a swath of new teammates, and a new North Star metric for Fi, keeping the teams focused, motivated, and inspired quickly became my primary goal.
And this challenge is not unique to Fi, or even Google. Gallup research finds that only 15% of U.S. employees are feeling enthusiastic about the future.
Skepticism, anxiety and uncertainty are running high according to that statistic, and data from our monthly team pulse scores seem to confirm it.
Every month, we take a pulse to measure the team's overall satisfaction — everyone rates the last month on a scale of 1 to 5. Then, we discuss what's going well and what could be improved.
4 years of data has shown the average is typically 3.2. The 2022 average increased to 3.5 due to a greater sense of community, influence, and direction. Unfortunately, our 2023 average was below average, hovering around 2.9 for most of the year.
While this is largely due to the layoffs, the team has also felt a lot of increasing pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. We needed new strategies.
To ensure the team had access to inspiration, reliable professional development strategies, and tools to build resilience, I initiated the UX Master Class Series.
Topics so far have ranged from deep diving on Fi business metrics to drawing to making music!
To address our growing resourcing concerns and avoid burnout for the team, we developed the Scaling UX Program. Essentially, it helped us shift from a binary staffing approach — supported / not supported — to a 3-tiered approach that included UX consults as a sort of middle-tier option. The consults were intended to be a lightweight way for UX to share best practices with XFN partners without having to go deep on a problem.
Our goals were to:
And the results have been interesting.
Staffing estimates reflect an increase in velocity across functions, but that came with an increased stress for most UXers. Going forward, we
At the beginning of 2023, our UXR resources were reduced by half. There were still a lot of requests for usability research, but what the products needed most was more foundational research to identify customer needs and explore why we were having success in some areas but not in others. We had to figure out how to do more with less, so we chose to adopt a solution that mirrored the Scaling UX Program.
And we called it "Doing more with less" because who needs clever codenames when you can be abundantly clear at the outset?
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