UX Team Structure

Achieving a thriving UX team and guaranteeing its seamless function.

Overview

  • Building teams, taking into account scaling and needs of the business

  • Creating a career framework that is reflective of the business structure and in line with industry standards

  • Creating a skills matrix that is used to form learning and development needs for the team, as well as hiring needs

  • Creating a culture of experimentation and continuous discovery

Creating structure within the team

Role: Head of UX | Company: Cazoo

I collaborated with the UX Design Director to establish a team management structure for our rapidly growing team. We created a new player-coach role where the Lead Product Designer would take on some direct reports and report to the Head of UX. To maintain consistency, we established the same levels across Product Design, Content Design, and UX Research. Additionally, the new role contributed to the creation of a career development matrix, providing growth opportunities for the team.

Career Development and skills matrix

Role: Lead Product Designer (eporta), Head of UX (Cazoo)

  • Mapped out the key competencies designers should have

  • Identified how competent each level should be and what behaviours should be exhibited

  • This was used as a foundation to benchmark the team and their development plans

  • TOIL Framework

    During my time at eporta, I worked with the Head of Engineering to develop the TOIL framework. The Framework was designed so that it mapped to both practices.

  • Team Skills Matrix

    Alongside the Senior Designers in the team, we mapped out each member of the team

  • Career Progression Plan

    Creating and ensuring each indivdual within the team had a development plan and their development is discussed regualrly

Hiring
When screening for team skills gaps based on the skills matrix, I prioritize three key areas.

  • Communication and storytelling skills

  • Collaboration with peers

  • Design thinking and problem solving skills

  • Case Study review to assess storytelling skills

  • Workshop with Product and Engineering peers

  • Live task to see assess problem solving skills

  • Culture add over culture fit

  • Meet with people they will be working with

  • Score cards to minimise bias

Comments from previous direct reports

“Venessa is a fantastic manager of managers. During my time at Cazoo, Venessa was able to guide and mentor me in ways to get the most out of my team and peers. She's a huge advocate for her team and consistently finds ways to promote her team and design interests across an organisation.”

— Divyen

Directly managed him during my time at Cazoo

“Her passion, encouragement, and support pushed the team to be better every step of the way. One of the skills that make her a great manager is her ability to provide feedback on work without controlling the outcome and allow designers to push themselves at the highest level.”

— Przemek

Directly managed him during my time at Vodafone

Positioning the team to create a culture of continuous discovery

Role: Head of UX | Company: Cazoo

Action Plan

I positioned the UX research team to do strategic work in order to influence company OKRs. The process was defined by myself in collaboration with the research team at Cazoo.

  • At the beginning of the quarter, the research team interviews commercial directors across the business to identify key themes

  • The team puts these themes on the research roadmap and prioritises them with myself and the Product and UX Director. 

  • Have a session with key stakeholders that helps to form the research plan

Goal: to drive innovation and help design to be at the forefront, suggesting new features and identifying opportunities. 

Use strategic research to identify and shape opportunities early

Create a culture of experimentation to quickly validate ideas

Collaborate with business stakeholders to test new proposition ideas

Reposition the UX research team to do strategic research

Upskill the Product Designers in quick validation and experiments

As a result of UX researchers focusing more strategically, we needed to upskill the Product Designers and Product Managers in UX research and using our existing tooling. At Cazoo, we organised the UserTesting.com team to come in and facilitate a series of workshops.

CASE STUDY

How UX research and insights have been used to drive company strategy and team decisions

Developing the brief

A request from the Commercial Directors was received to understand customer preferences for car pickup and drop-off. The business seeks to optimize site usage and booking availability and explore potential monetization opportunities for customers.

Upon understanding from the stakeholders what they wanted to find out and how they were planning on using the information. The team divided the research into 3 parts:

  • Competitor analysis

  • Interviews with users selling their car

  • Interviews with users purchasing a car

Findings

  • For 3 out of 5 users price of delivery/ collection was the most important factor.

  • Paying more for convenience is expected; customers are prepared to wait for the right car.

  • Flexible work means a day of the week/ time is less important, but all-day slots feel inconvenient.

  • The location of the drop-off site was important; customers considered how they'd get there and back.

  • Users were open to refundable deposits to secure Cazoo Purchase slots.

  • Users would need transparent information about why there was a deposit and any cancellation fees.

Outcome

  • We are currently exploring the possibility of establishing new collection and drop-off locations in easily accessible areas, such as city centers.

  • Introduction of a cancellation fee and investigation into refundable deposits

  • Introduction of a test for late night shopping hours

Fulfilment team experiments

The strategic research allowed the fulfilment team to identify key levers that customers care about and to focus on those experiments so that customers are more likely to transact and drive average profit per order.

  • More messaging to increase awareness of the closest drop-off sites

  • Surfacing alternative options when the option they selected is unable

  • Not prioritising experimenting with All day slot

The team have managed to:

  • Make an average of £20 more per order

  • Improve slot availability by 30%