Designing Impact: My Leadership Journey at JSW One Platforms
Brief
As a design leader at JSW One Platforms, I have built my approach around identifying opportunities, solving critical business problems through design, and fostering a user-centric culture across the organization. Below, I outline key aspects of my leadership journey and initiatives, each grounded in impactful processes and collaboration.
Identifying Opportunities for Design Interventions
One of my primary responsibilities is to uncover opportunities for design interventions within the business. Here’s how I approach this:
Listening to the Business
I observe recurring challenges and opportunities discussed in formal meetings and casual conversations across teams. These discussions often highlight pain points or gaps that design can address.
Formulating Hypotheses
Based on my observations, I create hypotheses around these problems, focusing on how design solutions can drive value for both the business and its users.
Customer Research Programs
To validate these hypotheses, I lead customer research initiatives, gather insights, and use them to guide design strategies.
Actionable Solutions
Insights from research are translated into actionable solutions. I collaborate closely with the product team to add these solutions to the product roadmap, ensuring their alignment with business priorities.
Measuring and Iterating
Once implemented, I work with the product team to measure the outcomes, map the impact, and continuously improve the solutions.
Leading Customer Research and Promoting Empathy
Understanding the customer lies at the heart of design leadership. I have taken the following steps to ensure the organization remains focused on user needs:
Developing Research Methodologies
I design comprehensive research programs tailored to uncover actionable insights, such as surveys, interviews, and usability testing.
Encouraging Cross-Functional Engagement
I actively share research insights with the product team, sales team, and other stakeholders to help them understand our customers better.
Building Empathy
By encouraging teams to participate in user interviews and feedback sessions, I foster a culture where decisions are rooted in user needs and pain points.
Introducing a Design Framework Based on Lean UX
To streamline the design process and ensure agility, I created a design framework inspired by Lean UX principles. This framework allows the team to:
• Focus on continuous learning and iteration rather than fixed deliverables.
• Rapidly test and validate ideas with users before committing to larger development cycles.
• Collaborate seamlessly with cross-functional teams, integrating research, design, and product efforts.
Establishing Clear Sources of Design Problems
To keep the UX team focused on meaningful problems, I identified and formalized three primary sources of design challenges:
1. Product Roadmap and Annual Operating Plan (AOP)
• Collaborating with the product team, I ensure design priorities align with the company’s strategic goals.
• Features and improvements are stack-ranked, allowing the team to focus on high-impact tasks.
2. Continuous User Research Programs
• To maintain a steady pulse on user needs, I established ongoing user research initiatives, including surveys, usability tests, and contextual inquiries.
• These programs ensure that design decisions are data-driven and proactively address user pain points rather than reacting to isolated issues.
​​
3. Regular Product Audits:
• I lead periodic audits of our product to identify usability issues, inconsistencies, or potential enhancements.
• These audits often uncover low-hanging fruit that can significantly improve user experience.
4. Customer and Business Conversations:
• I frequently join sales and category teams on customer and seller visits. These conversations provide first-hand insights into user pain points.
• Informal interactions with business stakeholders also reveal challenges that may not surface in formal channels.
By consolidating these sources, the UX team works on problems that are both user-centered and strategically aligned with the business.
Impact of My Design Leadership
Through these initiatives, I have driven a user-centric culture, built alignment between design and business goals, and delivered measurable outcomes. My focus on research, collaboration, and iterative design has positioned design as a strategic asset within JSW One Platforms.