During 2020 I led a Product Design Team of 6 designers in the biggest German beauty e-commerce.


I onboarded myself by applying non-scientific Naturalistic observation for 2 weeks, embedding within the Product team mainly as an observer and researcher. I complemented the observation with 1 (1h.) interviews with each member in the Product team (15 people), and 1 additional interview (2h.) with each member of the Product Design Team (5 people), these with the added purpose of profiling their roles together and starting a bond.




Crossing my findings with the business needs (defined by high level OKRs, company values and work streams), I agreed with the team on a set of next steps based on Design Thinking, in order to face the main challenges found: a lack of scalable design processes and operations, (which led to difficulties maintaining and measuring usability through consistent and accessible design), and a still low UX maturity across the company.



The goal of this UX strategy map was to put the focus on a more holistic user-centred innovation, in opposition to very clustered and overhead-heavy design work (low velocity), carried on at the time by designers freestyling in each of the cross-functional teams. 




UX Strategy breakdown draft ︎︎︎ 
(scroll horizontally) 

Design Thinking principles at flaconi (pretty standard, but not always followed) ︎︎︎

1. Research-based (trust that user value translates into business value)
   
2. Tech-feasible (really cross-functional)
   
3. Non-linear & iterative (agile)
   

Epic Template (our interface with the PO for documenting iterative work on design problems) ︎︎︎

This blueprint is the result of the collaboration with the POs of the 6 cross-functional teams, in order to better define the essentials of an epic / feature / design & engineering problem in each of its iterations before we advance on the design process. It helps with expectation management within the teams and the business, it connects with the roadmap, and it offers a permanent view on our user-centred vision, which also moves forward with each release. 

Design Critique formats ︎︎︎

The following Design Critique formats are loose definitions of the shapes that our recurrent ideation sessions could take, depending on what do we want/need to consult on, or what information are we missing to solve issues related to either our personal development, or our daily business as designers. Of course hybrids, meta, and “shapeless” meetings were possible and happened often.  The category “Jam”, is an accordion in itself, and every product designer knows a few design thinking ideation methods that were definitely used also by us under that category.