Delivering Incremental Customer value: Strategic Leadership for Behavioral Change
As Head of UX, I drove a shift to a customer-centric approach, unified product experiences, and enhanced team collaboration. By implementing Design thinking, JTBD and agile practices, I increased project efficiency, team alignment, and user satisfaction.
Services
Head of UX, Home& Field Services
Company
Xplor Technologies
Year
2024
The organization needed to shift from a feature-centric approach to a customer-centric focus to deliver more meaningful value and improve user experience.
The
Challenge
The existing model was primarily feature-driven, which meant adding new functionalities without fully understanding or addressing the deeper needs of our users. This approach led to fragmented experiences and missed opportunities to deliver meaningful value.
Recognizing this, I initiated a shift in mindsets and practices to ensure that every feature and enhancement was aligned with solving real user problems and improving the overall experience.
The
Strategic Approach
Embracing JTBD Framework
Initially, the product team was skeptical and resistant to moving away from a feature-centric mindset, finding it difficult to embrace the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework.
I introduced the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework to help the team uncover the core tasks and challenges field technicians were trying to solve. Through a series of focused discussions, the team began to see the importance of addressing real technician needs, which ultimately led to solutions that were better aligned with what technicians truly required.
​Breaking down Complexity
The Product and UX teams struggled to break down complex product challenges into smaller, actionable user stories, as they were accustomed to handling large features all at once.
I collaborated with product managers to decompose these challenges into manageable components. By delivering incremental improvements, the team recognized the benefits of tackling complex issues in a structured way, resulting in more effective solutions tailored to the needs of technicians.
Prioritizing with MoSCoW
As the product team transitioned from delivering full features in a waterfall approach to adopting Agile practices, they faced challenges in prioritizing tasks that provided value to technicians.
I guided the product managers in using the MoSCoW method to categorize features and improvements into Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, and Won’t-Have. This approach enabled the team to focus on critical features that provided the most value to technicians, aligning our efforts with their needs and business goals.
Delivering incremental value
Communication barriers and rigid mindsets created silos between the product, design, and engineering teams, making it hard for them to work together and adapt to Agile. This limited their ability to deliver value to customers.
In collaboration with the Scrum Master, I introduced Agile methodologies to the product and design teams to promote flexibility and iterative development. We emphasized cross-functional collaboration through sprint meetings and shared goals, which significantly improved communication.
As the team began to embrace rapid feedback and continuous improvement, they became more comfortable with Agile’s adaptive approach. This shift resulted in increased team velocity and greater incremental value delivery for technicians, leading to more effective solutions in just five sprints.
Emphasizing Impact Through Feedback
Shifting from traditional feature completion metrics to user satisfaction and engagement metrics was challenging, as the team had to adapt to new ways of measuring impact on technicians.
I collaborated with product leadership to introduce a customer beta program for continuous feedback, refining our success metrics to focus on technician satisfaction and overall impact. As the team recognized how these metrics provided a clearer view of product value, they aligned their efforts with delivering meaningful improvements that better served technicians.
