My role

Domain leader of a global team, with big scope and business impact.

I co-led the Order Management domain, which comprised four product teams with 50 cross-functional team members across four continents and was responsible for all purchase and post-purchase site, email, and SMS experiences that handled 19 million orders annually. I represented the domain in senior leadership forums; contributed to cross-domain efforts; guided domain strategy, direction, and focus; and made sure our teams delivered great outcomes (big and small) through improved processes, quality bars, and shared purpose.

Opportunity

How might we deliver more meaningful experiences faster and with higher quality? Especially after a reorg.

When I joined the Order Management domain after a reorg, I learned from 1:1s and discussions with the UX team and my PM and engineering partners that team members were proud that they built a culture of collaboration and continuous delivery of optimizations. I also noticed underlying feelings that product teams were working towards different goals, with competing prioritization and rushed releases. I met the team where they were and introduced lightweight frameworks and rituals to address three opportunities –– alignment, rationale, and craft –– that would increase our velocity and quality.

Aligning teams

Teams were misaligned because they didn’t know where we were going and had too many sidebar conversations.

I introduced the Vision Statement and regular Experience Reviews.

The Vision Statement immediately resonated with the team because it articulates a single shared aspiration and the values we believe will get us there. Teams used its language, have converged on the direction of our work, and were more engaged.

Experience Reviews facilitated day-to-day alignment, especially important in our async culture. This ritual created cross-functional forums that fostered critical discussion and resulted in quicker feedback loops across teams and levels.

Articulating rationale

We needed more rigorous research and meaningful articulation for our work.

I improved those skills in the team through hiring and frameworks.

Organizational hurdles made it hard to get the support we needed from the resource-strapped UX Research team. I hired a UX designer with research experience to model and scale additional research methodologies in our team. To ensure we continuously raised the quality bar, my team defined UX Metrics, which we measured quarterly to tell us how we were tracking towards our Vision Statement and informed quarterly planning.

The most common question we asked (and answered) was “Why?” Teams initially often answered it only partially. The UX team modeled articulating more rigorous rationale through a simple framework: Why does it matter to (1) customers, (2) the business, and (3) our teams?

Improving craft

Teams felt rushed and scattered.

I carved out time in roadmaps to design systematically and assess quality through Weekly Crits.

I aligned domain leadership to prioritize design-led workstreams that were “horizontal” (end-to-end) and “vertical” (components). Designers designed the system, not just individual features or use cases. Experiences became increasingly consistent, cohesive, and complete.

I also introduced Weekly Crits, the forum where designers gained visibility, broke down siloes, and built shared ownership of the holistic experience.

Results

Our high-trust, collaborative teams deliver more meaningful work faster, with higher quality and business impact.

• Increased conversion rate 3.5%.

• Decreased cart abandonment rate 1.5%.

• Decreased order rejections rate 26%.

• Decreased customer support case rate 7%.

• Interviewees described our updated experiences as “smooth,” “clear,” and “natural” and makes them feel “confident” and “warm towards the products and website.”

Reflections

It’s fun fine-tuning teams who were already bonded and had established cultures.

I spent the first month observing and listening because teams were working well together. After identifying opportunity areas, I found it important to be sensitive to the teams when introducing changes. Rather than large-scale new processes and goals, changes were lightweight, integrated into existing practices, or incremental (but high-impact!) adjustments. These changes were effective because they deepened relationships through shared purpose, values, and practices.