As a Startup, Socrata lacked any clear rigor or structure to the design process. With an initial team of 3 designers, making a process that would work in the SCRUM cycles required the creation of several programs to support a design process we could get behind. My role was to lead and grow the team to a mature, professional practice of UX and it's partnerships within product development.
A set of illustrations by our team member, Lois Zhao. We wanted to see ourselves as a unique group from the product management team and worked to establish a team identity.
Team Workshops
After intial triage of team process and growing the team from 3-4 contributors, we began investigating ways we could and should improve our practice. The first workshope emphasized design process and team collaboration. The second worked to identify our role in realizing the core values of Socrata's culture. Out of this we made decisions to improve the relationships with the Product Management team with new planning methods, hire a full-time UX Researcher to develop research-centered programs, and build a new critique process for in-person and async feedback on design artifacts..
Career Conversations
By 2019 we had realized all of our initial team developments and I transitioned focus from ad-hoc career palnning to support individuals on a more systematic level, leveraging the process of Career Conversations outlined in the book Radical Candor. I created a framework for the designers and our new researcher to use for create personal career goals as well as proejcts that would help realize progress toward them while working at Data & Insights (as we had now been acquired by Tyle Technologies)
