The UX Leaders we need
Hannes Unger, Zürich, 15. October 2021
1. Introduction
The following article was written with the intention of taking up and answering a question that came up at Workshop #1 of the European UX Leadership Network in March 2021 and that has continued to occupy us, its initiators, in the aftermath. This is the question of what the profile of the ideal and correspondingly successful UX Leader should look like in view of its multi-layered and complex challenges. It is of particular relevance because its answers not only influence considerations regarding the training of UX Leaders, but also strongly affect the self-management of each individual UX Leader.
The European UX Leadership Network was founded with the mission to establish a Europe-wide network of UX Leaders to significantly rise the influence of User Experience thinking throughout the economy. Its strategy aims to develop from a continuous series of dynamic UX workshops to a vibrant and powerful cross-country network of UX Leaders.
As preparation for our initial Workshop #1 of the European UX Leadership Network we requested case descriptions from our participating UX Leaders to get a clearer picture what challenges they must face during their daily work. Reading these case descriptions carefully and analyzing them with respect to common patterns, the following conclusions can be drawn.
A small avantgarde of companies, most of which are headquartered in sunny California, have already inscribed the basic concepts of UX thinking into their corporate DNA, so that UX has established itself as a determining value in both corporate strategy and culture. Of course, even such companies still have challenges to overcome, but more in the area of classic management tasks such as establishing a uniform UX in a very heterogeneous product landscape with a wealth of different individual products. Basically, however, the thick boards have already been drilled here.
The situation is quite different in the main field of the competition, where most of the companies are located and the biggest hurdles still have to be overcome. Here, 2 problem areas or challenges in particular have emerged in the case descriptions:
Main challenges derived from case descriptions
The first major finding is that the strategic decisions for which the C-level is responsible do not reflect any UX thinking and it seems that the vast majority of board members is not aware of the potential of a consequent adoption of UX principles during the process of product and service development.
Therefor it’s a main challenge for a UX Leader to sustainably infect the C-level with UX thinking and thus to establish it as a key factor in strategic decision making.
Secondly many UX Leaders have the persistent issue that the collaboration of their UX people with the members and stakeholders of other departments (Business, IT, Customer Care) is cumbersome in the sense that consequent UX thinking and orientation ends at the own door and is not part of a companywide culture.
Based on this finding one must state that a further UX Leaders main task is to ‘somehow’ infuse the overall company culture with UX thinking and its concepts and values.
Based on this finding one must state that a further UX Leaders main task is to ‘somehow’ infuse the overall company culture with UX thinking and its concepts and values.
As the aim of this article is to develop a clearer picture of the characteristics and skills which successful UX leaders must have or be able to develop, we first need to take a closer look at their key challenges and understand what respective solutions they need to be able to develop.
In order to keep this article from being long-winded, I would like to initially focus on the first issue finding only, which I would like to call the ‘C-level challenge’. A second reason for this focus setting is that I firstly would like to validate the methodological approach with a single example before putting more effort into analyzing further challenges.
2. Problem Exposition
During our EUXL Workshop #1, we were able to examine and discuss the previously identified problem areas in detail in dedicated talks. As I mentioned above and for the above stated reasons, this article will focus exclusively on the ‘C-level challenge’.
In our concerning discussions it became quickly clear that hardly any UX Leader has direct C-level assignments, which would of course be one desirable scenario. However, one could ask why this should be a good sign and argue that lively and functioning User Centricity can very well exist without direct C-level assignments. This is true but would presuppose that a company as a whole already operates on a high UX maturity level which as we could see does not correspond to reality in the vast majority of the cases. Thus I would like to argue that direct C-level assignments to the UX Leadership are a good indication in most cases since they show that at least parts of the C-level are aware of the significance of the UX value creation. But again: in reality in most cases neither a high UX maturity level nor direct C-level assignments to UX Leadership are in place.
Various participants clearly stated that the desired solution here is not to install a specific role such as a Central UX Officer at C-level. I would like to endorse this position:
It cannot be the primary goal to possibly only symbolically have a CUO placed on the top board, but that UX aspects, if relevant, are quasi naturally taken into account in the board's decisions as a whole and then result in appropriate measures.
No question, under ideal circumstances the CEO or the engineering or marketing leads would be clearly aware and informed why and how proper UX work is essential for the success of their company and thus decide and lead accordingly. But this mostly doesn’t seem to be the case, maybe also because many to most of these managers made their carriers in organizations characterized by silo-like structures not being driven by interdisciplinarity. Thus, one of the most important and decisive tasks of a UX Leader must be to sustainably infect the C-level as a whole with UX thinking and UX values. The above rough problem exposition will mean for us UX Leaders in the vast majority of cases
that we won’t be able to avoid the task of systematically and smartly carry the 'good UX news' to the top management of the company. Since apparently most of us are working in traditional to modern companies or organizations still characterized by classic hierarchies this also means that UX Leaders will have to go the cumbersome way bottom-up.
We will discuss in the next chapter how this multi-dimensional communication challenge can be tackled best.
3. Solution Sketch
The EUXL Workshop #1 gave the participating UX Leaders also the opportunity to explore solution approaches for the above described and elaborated challenges. For the question how to sustainably infect the C-level with UX thinking the following strategies and tactics were suggested by the participants:
Speak the language of the C-level to communicate at eye level
Establish proximity to and influence on business and IT by using UX skills to solve important problems on the radar of the company leadership
Let the users speak in the context of the communication of success stories to make the UX message more tangible and vivid
Establish a shared understanding of what UX means leveraging the examples from success stories
Showcase the success of UX to the top management with ‘emotional’ numbers and hard facts
Measures to solve ‘C-level challenge’
In this sense, the successful UX leader must not only handle a wide range of handicraft UX tasks, but above all solve complex communicative challenges that go beyond mere situational and short-term selling.
To achieve this, it is first of all essential to master the language of the C-level. And in a way that transcends the simple 'threshing' of business and management phrases. In order to be able to convince in the long term, to act at eye level and to exert influence accordingly, it is not only necessary to master the use of the corresponding terms, but it is even more necessary to really understand and comprehend the underlying concepts and values. Or, to put it in more philosophical terms, a successful UX leader must be able to "switch the discourse" and, in the age of digitization, of course not only to the business or marketing but also to the world of the IT.
As it clearly emerged in our discussions, one of the most promising strategies for successful UX leadership could be to have an open ear and a seeing eye for the problems of 'the others' [1] in their fields and to instrumentalize UX in a targeted manner in order to develop respective reference solutions with decisive UX support, which are clearly then predestined as UX success stories. To be able to do this successfully, a UX leader must understand the core of the respective problems and in turn be able to switch to the respective discourse with its specific concepts and values.
If, on the basis of this strategy, corresponding successes have been achieved in the sense of success stories as reference solutions, the next step is to market these elegantly and effectively to the C-level.
Since UX thinking focuses on the needs of the user, a communication strategy is required here that also brings the user into focus, shows the respective success in the light of the improvements for the user and highlights these aspects as key factors for the success of the project.
Ideally, the users themselves should be given a chance to speak within the corresponding communications and their 'real' statements should be used, which explain the project success, make it tangible and thus adequately document it. In this way, not only the success of the project itself is documented, but also the thinking and culture behind it, which made the success possible in the first place.
In addition, the communication and leveraging of the UX success stories in the direction of the C-level offers the opportunity to work out further essential facets of UX as a success factor in the company.
As our workshop participants legitimately suggested the achieved successes should also be used to precisely elaborate and tangibly demonstrate what the very contribution and value of UX for this specific company in essence could be. This promise or vision most likely will look quite differently dependent on for example if a company has its focus in mechanical engineering, producing hardware devices for chemical laboratories or if it is engaged in the development of new blockchain based DeFi services. However and independently of any quite natural difference: in both cases
UX vision and promise can then efficiently be used to establish the core of the internal UX brand within a specific company. The sharper, more precise, more self-confident and more ambitious promises and vision are modelled, the stronger the UX brand will be able to establish itself.
Fortunately the achieved successes can and should not merely be used to establish a strong, company-internal UX brand they can also be very helpful to demonstrate the value of UX in terms of hard numbers and facts. In this sense it should also be a selection criterion of UX opportunities within a company that they are suitable for a precise and impressive ROI demonstration later on. Even better if UX KPIs including proper measurements have been implemented already which then can be used for the purpose at hand. However this is not a necessary condition and according to my experience not even reality in most of the companies.
But it should be a requirement for at least a significant part of the UX successes that they are impressively communicable in some hard, relevant and reliable numbers.
So for example in the recurrent standard case of optimizing an existing online shopping process the UX leader should later on be able to precisely communicate to what extent the drop-out rate could have been reduced or the absolute number of purchases could have been increased. Another good example here relates to internal applications used by customer support employees which are usually and unreasonably a stepchild of UX efforts. An UX Leader is a happy guy if he may demonstrate to the C-level to what extent the execution time for a frequent support use case could have been reduced and what this exactly means in terms of cost reduction. Accordingly UX Leaders should proactively look out for such opportunities.
4. Conclusions regarding the ideal UX Leader
It can be assumed that, depending on the organization and the place where they are placed in it, UX Leaders are involved with different roles and correspondingly specific management tasks. Accordingly, a UX leader could, for example, be the head of an internal UX design team, the UX manager for a specific product or service, or perhaps even the UX change manager of a company. Depending on this, different, specific management skills will be a priority for him. The UX change manager, for example, must of course know the ABCs of change management, while the head of an internal UX design team should at least have solid leadership and recruiting skills as well as appropriate stakeholder management skills.
These considerations are certainly not uninteresting, but they only marginally touch on the actual subject of this paper. It goes without saying that UX Leaders or managers must have the appropriate UX craftmanship and management skills for their specific roles. It can also be assumed that the UX leaders currently working in their respective management roles have mastered their tools and are at least doing a reasonable job.
So if we want to understand why UX is often not achieving any resounding successes despite all the expertise and excellence currently at work, we have to turn our attention to the more general challenges and their possible solutions partly outlined above, which usually lie beyond the classic UX and management tasks.
Because this is where the deficits must lie, be it that certain tasks are simply not tackled due to a lack of time or knowledge, or that the personal characteristics or skills needed for handling these challenges properly are missing. Having done so especially in Chapter 3, trying to roughly sketch proper solution approaches for one of the most outstanding challenges, it is apparent that all solution approaches having being looked at so far involve ‘proper communication’ in one or another way.
Consequently our wanted UX Leader has to be a good communicator and this in multifaceted ways, channels and so to say contexts or discourses. Let’s have a closer look now at what ‘good communicator’ exactly means and presupposes in terms of characteristics and skills.
Necessary abilities of a UX Leader derived from crucial activities
The UX Leaders which we need:
Must be able and open to switch to other discourses and also understand them in depth. They must be able and willing to understand them in their motivations, values, concepts and styles in order to be able to mediate, balance, build bridges and find common denominators between disciplines (e.g. business, IT, marketing).
Must be able to shape their communication in line with the discourse, that is, both in terms of content and form. This concerns the choice of communication tools, channels and, above all, style. As we have seen above, sometimes it is appropriate to emphasize the specific qualities of a solution, but on other occasions a number-oriented / financial view of success must be brought to the fore.
Must be able to communicate the own conceptual clarity from a UX perspective in different ‘languages’ and in different ways that fit the needs and mental models of the respective audience.
Must be open and curious and willing to enter new territory. This requires courage and the willingness to expose oneself and leave the safety of the terrain of one's own specialist discipline. In this respect, the UX leader must not want to be a pure subject matter expert (this was formerly called a ‘Fachidiot’ at least in Germany), but must be able to value such expertise and use it optimally. This aspect also includes the fearlessness required to advocate UX interests in front of the top management with calmness, determination and sovereignty.
Must be open and empathetic in a broader sense, not only with respect to users and customers but also with respect to stakeholders from other disciplines and top management. They must be able to read and understand motivations even where they are not communicated absolutely clearly or transparently, or where 'hidden agendas' are used.
They must be instinctive in tracking down UX opportunities in order to generate as many marketable success stories as possible. This is also linked to rejecting or turning away orders in case of doubt, where from a UX point of view not much added value can be achieved and hardly any merits are to be gained. This also requires courage, tactical skill, and the power of persuasion.
Must be able to develop coherent tactics and strategies to bring UX forward in their own company, as outlined above. This development work is usually not part of the 'official mission', which requires additional courage, creativity and perseverance. It also requires the ability to adequately and 'objectively' analyze one's own work environment and company context (see also Malouf 2016, p. 70/71).
Derived UX Leader characteristics