Founding UX
Founding UX at a major company.
Fight me, I'm out to start some trouble. I have seemingly successfully negotiated my way into founding the in house UX branch of a major company which has traditionally only leveraged UX as vendors or seemingly low maturity UX/UI engineers (also frankly mostly vendors).
I'm absolutely pumped out of my mind. I've been working in UXR for over 10 years from start-ups to FAANG and then down to mid-sized 100-500mil annual rev companies. I've commonly found myself in situations where I've reported to directors of design most commonly with product being the biggest customer/funder.
I've always been very impact and business case minded. In my historical roles I've always typically been a high performer, a fixer of failed ux relationships, a transformationalist, and someone who's very business case aware. However, I legitimately feel like that impact me or my team would do would basically die in the dark at the end of the year. Design owned the cadence relationships with executive leadership, design directly reported to C level, and frankly it seemed like they took the lion's share of all credit and funding from UXR. Assuming the best intentions, they tried to market it and failed to be an effective middleman, or at worst they were interested in their own development first.
When the money rolled down hill end of year for bonuses or team expansion, irrelevant of if my team had exponentially blown away velocity, product impact, business impact, and/or strategy leadership. The evaluative documents were all the sourced impact to metrics backed by jira tickets, decks, leading and lagging indicators, profit, and waste reduction. Specific financial impact you didn't need to calculate the math on, it was already done and sourced but had to correlation to team funding. Instead, it was, "c-level" earmarked this for design, here's what design earmarked for UXR. You're a boiler plate high performer, here's an irrelevant % based on total company performance divided by the ux team with an irrelevant performance band financially less than a month of being an uber gig side hustle. Head count recs? We will cherry pick that first, promotions go to my RL local friends, chao.
I personally think a big part of that has been this legacy mentality that UX Design gets introduced first and you *have to have more of them*. However, I've always been a skeptic of this, and I've always felt that senior UX research leadership is better positioned for this because we are typically closer to the business cases, the strategy work, and often the literal insights team. So, when my noncompete was positioned to roll off at the start of this month I made the play. I targeted the executive branch of the largest tech company to compete adjacent for what they do to my last company and leveraged my reputation and the fact that I was the senior most expert in our field (Rarely will there be an posted role for this sort of thing, so you got to make the relationship play). I started with the industry mastery pitch cold email. I then got tagged to a company exec.
The first meeting, I pitched industry mastery and modeled it for 30 min. The second meeting (Was an hour, went long at an hour and a half), I modeled how I thought their development pipeline looked externally in a whiteboarding workshop and they filled in the gaps. I then had pre prepped how to fill that gap with ux in a series of lean bets tailored to their location, ecosystem of talent, company culture, and finances I could deduce from public info. I built a case around decision confidence, velocity, and organizational maturity. That seemed to have already won it for me but during my third round which went another hour and a half I also modeled the evolution of UX over time in the era of AI.
AAaand i got it.
All I want to say, is that I want this win so bad for us and i needed to climb on top of a building and shout about it mostly anonymously because its early. I want to nock this out of the park for team UX Research. My dream is to show UX Research leadership can and should be the function driver with direct access to sell itself to the executive leadership. My plans to go move to their executive leadership hub and relationship build like a monster while I hopefully scale this in a series of lean bets using case study success to sell across functions.