There is a job role I have been experimenting with for the last couple of years called UX Producer. In my humble opinion, it has been a terrific success and has helped in countless ways. I thought it would be helpful to share the concept and how it works.
Mission of UX Producers
UX Producers should develop processes and programs that would make the rest of the team more efficient, productive, and effective. Producers should understand the entire corporate ecosystem and connect people together whenever they see the need.
This mission is purposefully open-ended and vague. Each organization has different needs and those needs evolve over time. UX Producers don’t limit themselves to just product design concerns. Anything they can see that would help the broader team is fair game.
I first heard of people like this at Intuit in 2006, where they had Six Sigma teams. These people were a mix of process and service design. Although, Six Sigma was invented at Motorola, I think Intuit got it from their CEO at the time who came from GE where it was popularized.
Producers are not Six Sigma teams, but the seed of the idea started there. I also saw a partially related job posting for UX producer at Amazon that spiked my imagination.
Getting started
The people I pulled for this team were former UX Researchers. They had a broad knowledge of the team and were smart, motivated people. In the beginning, they were nervous and did not fully grasp what the day-to-day would be. I decided to kick start the programs they would develop. Here is the initial list:
Centralized Recruiting.
Rather than dozens of design managers doing their own triage system and hiring process, we centralized it down to 2-3 people. Previously, managers would spend up to 50% of their day recruiting; now it’s almost nothing. Centralization made our hiring more consistent and efficient. We currently go from posting-to-hired faster than any group in the company. Recruiting is a muscle and when you do it every day, you get quite good at it.
Employee onboarding
Most of the time, people are hired and thrown into the deep end after just a few days. I have always thought this was unfortunate. They need time to acclimate and learn the people, culture and current processes. I asked for a program that would last 3-4 weeks and have the employee completely trained up and ready to go. They “tour” teams and learn all about the enterprise. This program has been getting wonderful feedback from employees just getting started.
Research Operations
I strongly encourage all designers to get out into the world and learn about the lives of their customers. The most annoying part of research is finding the people, scheduling the time, and managing the communication before and after the call. Once the zoom starts, it’s much easier; you just ask questions. But the hassle of rescheduling with someone who is only moderately paying attention to you is brutal. Rather than every designer doing this themselves, we have a quick way to request a session and the producers just set it up. Producers do the grunt work so designers can focus on information they need from users.
#Ask-Producers and Audits
We set up a slack channel to ask producers questions and request help on a variety of topics. One early request were audits. An example of an audit might be “Help me find all of the places in the UI that have dashboard charts.” This has grown into a highly trafficked channel where people know they can get help quickly on a variety of topics.
Ongoing evolution
The Producer group took those initial programs and started adding more of their own. Internal documentation, analytics, beta programs, mentoring/buddy systems, and more have been added. They have come up with clever spreadsheet tracking systems, internal dashboards, surveys and more. I am continuously surprised by how innovative and effective they are.
Honestly, a producer group is a fantastic addition to any team. They improve effectiveness and efficiency everywhere they go. I would suggest to any medium-to-large size company to invest in a group like this. Your ROI will be significant.
Happy Holidays!
Whatya think?