<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_gray.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_gray.svg" width="40px" /> The information in this page is intentionally high level, as it refers to an internal confidential project, where UX was imposed a significant challenge. Please reach out for further details

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Company

• OutSystems - Low code software development and CI/CD platform

Role

• UX and Team Lead

Key Skills

• Team leadership
• Stakeholder management
• Service thinking

Scope

As a UX and Team Lead, I’ve both enabled and performed UX work in the context of the OutSystems Developer Cloud platform. The main responsibilities included providing team members with the required context both on the system, and the UX processes in place, such as correctly applying the design system.

Understanding of the OutSystems platform

Conceptual design of the new extension

Continuous planning and delivery

Challenge

Extending the OutSystems core platform with new concepts and capabilities that directly extend and connect to whats already in the product imposted a system thinking challenge.

• System understanding: the initiative impacted all the product experience with an additional layer of complexity.
• Spread knowledge: given the complexity of the initiative, the knowledge about the system and the initiative itself was spread across different people.
• Critical path: The UX work was in the critical path, requiring a clear and deep problem and system understanding, so that development teams could estimate and allocate the required efforts.

From a leadership perspective, team members required enablement with product and system context. This also imped the challenge of gaining the required context, enable team members, and collaborating with team in the design of the solution with an hands-on approach.

Strategy

• Connect with key peers from different areas to get a clear understanding of the whole system and problem parts - research, technical design, technical feasibility.
• Enablement and implementation of recurring collaborative sessions with different stakeholders, in order to ensure alignment.
• Upfront research, leveraging knowledge from key stakeholders such as PM for use case definition, and architecture for the technical constraints.
• Alignment with product ownership practice in order to ensure timeline alignment and negotiation.
• Hands-on work to accelerate the more technical challenging topics.

Supporting team members both in clarifying stakeholders expectations, and providing the required system, while supporting their ownership of the problem was essential to ensure the success of the initiative. Given the high pressure from senior management, I was also required to balance pushing the team members and shielding them from the external pressure.

Key achievements

This challenges was also an opportunity for the team to further develop:

• Further grow the team in system thinking & design, enhancing the capability to think in the product as a whole,