CASE STUDY . 05 . TEAM BUILDING & COACHING
Earning the right to coach came before any of the methods could land.
Designers reported to Product Managers. The team had been through repeated reorgs and was tired of new managers with new ways of working. I was the latest one.
ROLE
Sr. UX Manager, Home Services
COMPANY
Xplor Technologies
YEAR
2024
PARTNER
CPO- Chief Product Officer
WHAT I WALKED INTO
A team that had earned its resistance.
Yearly reorgs had taught the team to brace, not to invest. Every new manager came with new ways of working. Agile had just been introduced under the new CPO. Underneath, four things weren't quite working:
I was the next manager in that pattern. They questioned my methods, pushed back on the frameworks, and didn't welcome the change. They had a right to be skeptical.
The senior PM was making product decisions from years of working in the field..
Designers were translating what the application already did into what they called customer journey maps.
Each designer worked in their own product silo with no shared language across the team.
What got designed wasn't always what got built.
EARNING THE RIGHT TO COACH
Listening before frameworks. Empathy before the tools.
I didn't lead with frameworks. I led with listening. Sat in their critiques. Sat in their standup. Asked the PMs how their decisions actually got made. Asked the designers what had stopped feeling rewarding. Asked engineering what they wished came their way differently. No deck, no roll out plan, just questions for the first few weeks.
FROM SKEPTICISM TO ADVOCACY
The senior PM who tested me first.
The most senior PM had been making product decisions from years of working in the same industry. He was new to Agile and pushed back on the frameworks.
I sat with him one on one. Listened to how he had captured requirements before. Then I walked him through Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) on a Miro board, sticky note by sticky note, and showed him that JTBD wasn't replacing his judgement, it was structuring it. I showed him how to translate it into user stories engineering could actually build. He went from the biggest skeptic to the strongest internal advocate.
FROM APPLICATION LENS TO CUSTOMER LENS
Journey maps that started outside the screen.
Designers had been documenting what the application did and calling it the customer's journey. The screens and the map were the same thing. I taught them to step outside the application. To see the technician's actual day, what they moved between, what slowed them down, what they came back to. Journey maps started where the screens ended.
An application lens map vs. a technician-journey map
FROM SILOS TO ONE TEAM
Sharing the work, not just the tools.
Each designer had been working on their own product, in their own corner, with their own critiques. The team existed on the org chart but not in the work. That shifted when designers started sharing research across products, attending each other's reviews, and presenting their decisions to other designers and directly to cross functional teams instead of routing everything only through their Product Manager. They became a team because they started doing things teams do.
FROM MOCKUPS TO SHIPPING
What got designed had to be what got built.
The cost of separate teams had been quiet: designers shipped high fidelity mocks, engineers built something different; nobody traced why. With the new process, designers attended sprint planning. Engineers attended design reviews. Feasibility moved upstream of high fidelity, not after it. The gap closed because the two groups started seeing each other as collaborators on the same problem.
WHAT FOLLOWED
The trust came first. The numbers followed.
35%
31%
fewer usability support tickets
22%
faster task completion for technicians
18%
higher feature adoption
20%
faster design to dev cycles
35%
fewer UI bugs
The team that had braced for another reorg became the team that did the best work of their careers. The numbers came after that.
THE REFLECTION
When a team has been through enough disruption, the leadership work isn't introducing one more framework. It is being the leader who listens long enough to earn the right to change anything.