EAMC Acceleration: Product Design Velocity
Role: Director
Skills: Leadership, Collaboration, Communication, Capacity Planning, Operations, Accountability
Overview
Imprivata's flagship product, Enterprise Access Management, is an on-premises solution for hospitals and other organizations globally. In 2020, an investment was made to create a lighter-weight, SaaS offering that would simplify implementation and upgrade processes, along with a spider-web pricing model. For several years, the majority of the resources for EAM were moved over to support this initiative, Enterprise Access Management Cloud. We had many scrumteams based in Ukraine, and how to scale and estimate product design work was an ongoing experiment. At the end of 2023, we hit a critical point where acceleration and velocity of EAMC development needed to be re-considered. These are some ways in which I contributed to improving this for Product Design.
Themes surrounding PD capacity and velocity challenges
Alignment on role of PD
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Role definitions, assignments, dependencies for PD, better hand-off and tracking
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Improve forecasting and focus for PD
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PD and PM define focus and scope of PD effort based on Roadmaps and APMs (both UX architecture and detailed design deliverables); commit to less!
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Give regular visibility to capacity and timelines
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Socialize PD role definitions and assignments to value streams
Build capacity for faster decision-making within teams
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Develop guidelines for areas where PD might not contribute to provide scaffolding to PMs/POs/Eng on best practices
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Involve the responsible designer early in the requirements and solutioning process, rather than wait for PD Arch to do a hand-off
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Share experience frameworks with the responsible team early, and engage them regularly as the solution is refined to avoid big changes and surprise
Product Design resource model for EAMC
One of the challenges for our partners was they weren't always sure who to go to for what, so I set out to provide a clear role definition.
Forecast scope of Product Design effort
UX work can sometimes feel magical to those in other disciplines. We know that there is a process, no matter what size the project, but there are different factors that impact how much time is needed for any given project.
I developed this tool to help with aligning on priorities and scope with Product Management and Engineering. It was a lightweight way to illustrate what more involved work looked like, and we could roughly identify each project according to the level of commitment agreed upon with PM. This also helped with capacity planning, because any designer who had more than 2 "4's" would not have the capacity to take on more than work. We could then discuss the risk of not having PD involvement, and how we might mitigate It.
Illustrate Product Design dependencies for success
The success of any process relies on an understanding of inputs and outputs for each part of it. This is no different for Product Design deliverables, because design cannot work in a vacuum. I set expectations for what is needed.
Product Design roadmap
We experimented with creating a roadmap to provide transparency across all teams on a quarterly basis. It became a challenge to maintain due to continuous shifting in priorites, but it was helpful to illustrate the many simultaneous projects going on at once for the designers, and to help the teams understand that "delivered" isn't the end of the process; support during implementation can also require a lot of time, depending on what's discovered as engineers start to dig in.
Customize JIRA to add transparency to PD capacity
UX work is different by its nature than engineering work, so the framework in place for estimating tasks needs to be tailored accordingly. I collaborated with my senior staff and the scrum masters to make changes in JIRA so it would reflect expectations around product design involvement. The different statuses are meant to be a discussion between the designer and their PM/Engineering partners for shared expectations. Ultimately, the ideal scenario is where most of this planning happens at the team level, with leadership available to provide guidance for prioritizing work.
Establishing Product Design commitments to their partners
The success of any process relies on an understanding of inputs and outputs for each part of it, and a commitment to communicating with each other throughout. For our part, Product Design made these core commitments to their partners and teams.
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Work together with PM/EM to determine what big design decisions are needed for a team to get started and keep moving
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Share experience frameworks with the team early, and engage them regularly as the solution is refined to avoid big changes and surprise
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Share insights from user research activities so that everyone has a shared understanding of design rationale
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Provide timely feedback to team when asked questions during implementation
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Be responsive when new information comes up that may require an adjustment or redesign
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Prioritize design choices when needed
We also simplified our spec process, which had become too cumbersome and bloated with edge cases. By simplifying, we could keep teams moving and refine as we went along.
Outcomes
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These proposed changes came as a result of collaborating with my VP partners and senior members of my team. I built understanding and buy-in one-on-one, presented to my co-leaders, and then at an all-hands for EAMC. The goal was to have this as a reference, and to empower product designers to understand what was expected of them, while also making clear how they were to be supported.
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Many of the tools came as a result of trying and failing over multiple years. I learned that simplicity is more powerful than completeness, otherwise the message gets lost.
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EAMC went through many shifts as the new CEO moved resources back to our core, on-prem product, EAM. As these changes happened, we worked to migrate these processes to these teams to set new standards for managing product design dependencies.