In August 2022 I joined the Austrian scale-up refurbed as UX Lead. refurbed is a marketplace for repaired consumer electronics sold by certified suppliers, with the vision of putting 1 refurbished device in every European household by X date, in order to leverage e-trash. It promises the B2C customer money saving for fully functional devices while also engaging in more sustainable shopping behavior by leveraging e-trash. As a company, they aim to be profitable, carbon negative, and a relevant player in circular economy. 

Refurbed went through a moderate stage of hyper growth during 2021, and the product team wasn’t spared! From a team of 1 Head of Product, 1 PM and 2 UX designers, they grew into a team of 1 Director of Product,  2 Heads of Product, 6 PMs and 12 Design practitioners (2 UX leads, 1 UX writer, 3 UX researchers and 6 UX designers). They broke down the user journeys into product domains, bundled up in squads, and started applying agile methodologies. 
Going from 6 to 20+ might not seem like a lot when we read about Meta laying-off 11k and that meaning just reeling back 6 months time... but for an organisation of about 100 people almost tripling its size also in 6 months, it definitely makes waves 🌊.

My first homework was to discover more about that and other (related) organisational capabilities of refurbed by: 

👂🏻 Deep listening: 

• Studying and understanding business model 
• Embedding and understanding company culture & rhythm (remote setting)
  
• Inquiring, practising & understanding organisational & product capabilities for:
  

    - Formulating strategy and goals 
    - Asking questions before asking for solutions 
   - Deep knowledge acquisition, focus work, critical thinking 
   - Research (scalable, accessible, actionable and connected collection of insights, learnings, and issues) 
   - Execution & reporting (how are they measuring progress? is the data “CUIKA” Collected, Usable, Integer, Known, Actionable?) 
   - Collaboration & interfaces (Content of relationships) 


🔬 While gaining insight on the above, I also took a closer look at Design: 

Who are the people practising design at refurbed? (the ones that make me leave a piece of my heart at every job ❤️🔨).

- Their background
- Their professional skills
- Their technical skills
- Their personality traits
- Their aspirations in life & work

How? 1o1s, self-assessments, technical assessments, critiques, UX studios, circle of influence and control, role defininition, skill matrix...


How do they work?

- Are they a team? 
- Do they approach issues systemically? 
- To what extent they think they can practice design at refurbed and why? (Do they understand the objectives? Can they apply a process? How do they make decisions? Are they under pressure? How do they collaborate?) 
- What artifacts do they generate, what tasks & responsibilities do they have?
- What methods do they use and how? 
- Have they defined principles, and how are they guarded? 
- Who do they relate to (at work) and how are those relationships? (Expectations on them, their expectations on others. Boundaries). 
- What has changed since they started? (a lot, not a lot, what? Are they tired of change or see the need for some change?). 




At some point, it feels like we’re ready to 🛠 carefully operate on our challenges by:
 
- Reaching consensus around gaps
- Liaising productively
- Agreeing / Prioritizing focus points
- Defining and planning solutions, goal based and aiming to last
- Continuously monitoring execution (deep listening + open dialogue)
- Reporting periodically
- Correcting direction

and of course, to also ⭐️ strengthen what works: 

- Enabling more people within set boundaries
- Amplifying areas of high interest or high performance
- Expanding our circle of influence by learning and educating
- ...

Some of the things we have our hands on: 

- Contributing to OKRs “that don’t suck”
- Operationalizing research
- Creating helpers, master files, templates, file structure
- Expanding & measuring Design System implementation
- Visualizing UJ events & data schema
- Expanding & diversifying metrics
- Making data “CUIKA”
- Crafting Design Principles
- Mentoring & learning time based on milestones