💡 TL;DR
One of the Big 4 accounting firms had a complex ecosystem of homegrown internal and client facing applications. Each one designed and built separately. I led a team to move from siloed developer-driven product development to a UCD driven process and a consistent experience across the ecosystem.
The client was the technology division of a Big 4 accounting firm. The client’s Tax and Accounting practice has nearly one hundred SaaS applications built by their internal regional teams to organize, manage, calculate, communicate, and a hundred other functions.
The homegrown suite of tax and accounting tools was growing wild. Globally, the Tax and Accounting practice had a hugely fragmented toolkit that was expensive to maintain. Each application was owned by a different stakeholder with an independent development team in a silo. Each app looked and acted differently meaning it was difficult to move between teams.
Our objective was to generate a design and experience language that would allow consolidation of all of the applications under one platform management team.
Managing hundreds of duplicative applications is expensive, introduces risk, and slows communication across internal teams. The client needed to drastically reduce FE/BE development effort across all regions. A reusable experience and design framework would also speed up future application development.
I led a team to implement an experience and design driven product development process, to build a style guide and component library accessible to the organization’s entire technology team and reimagine the interaction patterns of the most complex applications.
The four major project steps were:
The insights team focused on creating and communicating an understanding of the many user types. Associates have different needs than directors, and client CFO’s have different needs than their junior accountants. The goals of the team included:
Deliverables:
💡 My Role:At the project initiation, I developed an insights scope and approach proposal to fit the agile product delivery process. On a weekly basis, I worked with the insights team to adjust scope and resources to ensure that insights delivery aligned with the product roadmap and the design team’s needs. For several research sprints, I personally planned and led contextual inquiries and usability testing. I presented, and supported the team in presenting, insights outcomes to our internal as well as various client teams.
The design team, scaling between three to seven members, focused on both building a structured and consistent design system as well as completely reimagining applications to support a corporate tax service. The goals of the team included:
Deliverables:
💡 My role:
At the project initiation, working with the Product Owner, I developed a product roadmap and accompanying approach proposal to fit the agile product delivery process. This included delivery schedules, resourcing needs, team interaction models, delivery templates, and communication strategies. On a daily basis, I worked with the design team members to sketch new designs, engage the designers to elevate their thinking, and ensure consistency across the team. I also individually mentored designers on the team. I personally delivered sketches and wireframes for some of the more complex design problems and led collaborate client/user design workshops. The designers and myself presented outputs two to three times a week plus monthly on client site.
The development team worked closely with the design team to maintain and add to the digital style guide and component library. They also worked closely with the many client application development teams to create consistency in application and troubleshoot concerns. The goals of the team included:
Deliverables:
💡 My role:
I worked closely with the development team to ensure outputs from the design team were implementable and consistent. I shared the design team roadmap with development ream lead to develop a delivery roadmap of updates to the digital style guide and component library, which was then shared with the client development teams. In short, my role was to ensure delivery expectations were well set with the development team, they had what they needed before they needed it, and to work closely with them to resolve issues. I also mentored some of the development team members on leadership and presentation skills.
The data strategy team generated experience driven KPIs and an approach for implementing analytics across all applications to measure them. The goals of the team included:
Deliverables:
💡 My role:
I worked with the data team to help them understand the broader landscape of the applications and to select appropriate KPIs. I met regularly with the data team to walk through new designs, and document additional behaviors to include in tracking. While the data team worked at a granular level, I provided a holistic view of the ecosystem and helped tell the story from the resulting data.
The experience strategy stream focused on bringing together the outcomes of the other streams (insight, design, development, data) into one cohesive product. I was the primary team member of this stream. The goals of this work-stream included:
Deliverables:
💡 My Role:
As team lead, this is where I spent between 30-50% of my time. Through planning, documenting, and communicating with my team as well as the various client teams, I worked to ensure everyone had what they needed to continue to deliver high quality work.
