Overview
Dependent on the organization and my role, several of my design positions have scaled into full scale product management.
As a UX Designer, my work and design deliverables would typically be scoped out by a product manager. As deliverables are completed and approved, the product manager would be responsible to move the designs forward; initially for production, then for release to market.
However, in a Product Management capacity, I’ve assumed responsibility of the whole process—including conception, design, development, quality analysis, release to market, user research and iterative improvements.
I’ve adopted the agile methodology in product management and development organically over time.
In early projects at Think You, I was working on a limited budget with outsourced developers so we attempted to maintain costs by negotiating fixed rates for projects up front. To achieve this, I completed the entire design process prior to beginning development so I can receive an accurate quote that would be comprehensive of all requirements needed to release to market. Midway through the first product we developed, the fallacies of this methodology became clear: engineering greatly underestimated the complexity of the project, minor changes disrupted development and the ultimate time to completion ended up being twice as long and expensive as expected.
Today, I employ a fully agile method with the goal of designing a new product alongside engineering and releasing an MVP to market ASAP to let users drive ongoing, iterative development.
I moved from static PDFs requiring constant updates to live design documents and workflows that allow for a seamless, continuous flow between design and engineering. I adopted product management tools to build out dozens of clear workflows that allowed more than a dozen people to work on a project at any given time. I’ve built review process that allowed me to manage and oversee testing, quality and performance of newly developed features. I’ve worked with data analysis engineers to build out dashboards to provide analytics of user behavior.
The results of my product management manifests in the finished products I release and is supported by the feedback I’ve received from my teams. With a clear vision, I can effectively design and manage the development of a product and lead multifaceted teams of engineers, animators, designers and content providers to developer world class, industry leading products.