Empowering SMEs Through Digital Trade Venture Design

Coming into the project, there was a clear problem statement defined.

However, due to a complicated backstory, the project started relatively abruptly without a proper mobilisation stage. As I first joined the project, I was allocated as the UX Designer for one of the 4 pods. In the first 2 weeks, I observed problems and risks starting to surface.

Firstly, on people and ways of working, we had a tight delivery timeline for all 4 pods and the delivery team was consisted of cross-regional team members - we had never worked together before and some members had less delivery experience. Without a proper mobilisation, there was misalignment in ways of working and delivery approaches, both across pods and between designers and developers. This made it extra challenging for the cross-pods team to hit the ground running smoothly, not to mention to work in a collaborative way with a shared goal, as the pods prioritised meet their own pod delivery milestone and worked in silo. Therefore, I noticed the potential risk of inconsistent deliverables and the need of re-working.

Secondly, on tools, the delivery sprint was planned to start right away, when we did not have the proper environment set up that no one had arranged the design tool for design team until I brought up the question, not to mention the time needed to get license approvals from my previous experience.
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As I identified and surfaced these problems with Project Delivery Lead, I was nominated to step up as UX Lead to help oversee the cross-pod delivery, while continue to serve as an individual contributor for my own pod at the same time.
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As I took up the challenge and stepped up as the UX Lead, I prioritised getting the design tool license ready and putting in place an aligned delivery approach for UX team.

I brought together the cross-pod designers to understand their pod's backlog, this enabled me to plan out the UX delivery plan, standardise the UX delivery process with sprint milestones, and set up daily check-ins to ensure transparency of pod status across designers and help with any blockers and risks.

At the end of each sprint, I would represent the UX team to communicate with cross-pod POs and Development Lead to ensure alignment or raise awareness of potential risks.

Once we had the delivery plan aligned, I began leading the team to first zoom out to connect the dots across pods and map out the happy path of the end-to-end user journey across the 4 features. This helped the team to build an aligned holistic view and design direction of the Alpha product, so that we had a shared goal to achieve.

Then, I led to team to zoom into the detail level to co-create the foundational design toolkit with common components and templates, as well as to define the UX deliverable formats like user flows and prototypes.

With the foundation set up, each of the pod designers including myself, was able to deliver UX design for our own pod more efficiently, while working towards a shared Alpha product vision.

While the cross-regional designers had varied experience and background, we also had a tight delivery timeline and I had my own pod to deliver, I found it essential to create an environment that encourages peer collaboration and helps everyone get up to speed.

To increase delivery efficiency, I drove closer collaboration among designers and set up recurring UX working sessions for everyone to share their work for peer review, so that we could discuss the design problem and iterate the solution with collective efforts. This ended up also helping to boost confidence for designers with less experience, ensure better consistency and quality of the work across pods, minimising risks of re-working, and eventually accelerating delivery velocity.

We also used this forum to align on how to adjust to scope changes, so that we could navigate through ambiguity throughout the project.

As we approached the end of Alpha Phase, we had a prototype of the end-to-end journey across 4 features ready for desirability testing, which we observed the sessions conducted by Researchers.

After the desirability testing, I saw the opportunity to help POs in making a more informed decision on how to proceed to Beta Phase, hence initiated running a backlog prioritisation workshop with each pod's PO. Advocating from customer experience perspective, I took the PO through evaluating the desirability, viability and feasibility level for each of the backlog items. We then plotted them onto a matrix to visualise the prioritisation according to desirability, viability and feasibility. This activity enabled POs to get an initial view of what to do with each item, e.g. what needs further exploration or breakdown, what are quick-wins, what should be parked aside, etc.

With that, we wrapped up Alpha Phase with a validated POC, and got ready to expand capability and create a complete proposition for soft launch.