Head of UX - Ocado Tech
When our previous UX Manager left Ocado Technology (2018), I applied for the position and got the job. This was the beginning of my Leadership journey. Today Head of UX, I now manage 4 UX teams across the Ecommerce department.
Building trust isn’t always easy, it takes time and dedication. Creating a psychologically-safe workplace is even harder. And getting your team aligned, focused and working as one is a never ending task…
But it’s my job, and I love it.
Growing the team
During my time as UX Manager (2018-2020) and then as Head of UX Ecommerce (2021-present), I had the chance to build an amazing team. At the start, it was only 2 juniors and me, and we then embarked on a journey to scale and grow our team.
I also had the joy to deal with department wide reorganisations, and my team (UK based at the time) inherited new designers and researchers based in our Barcelona and Wroclaw offices. This came with its own set of challenges (split location, new processes, cultural differences…) but I’ve tried my best to make our overseas friends feel part of the team.
Today, we are over 30 brilliant individuals, from graduate to senior, across Design, Design System and Research, taking care of a multi-channel Ecommerce platform for grocery retailers around the world.
The full UX Ecom team at our last get together in London (Sep 2022)
Design Principles: The 5S for success
With so many designers working on the same ecommerce solution, having some guiding principles proved to be useful to create alignment and feedback on designs objectively. A lot of companies out there have design principles and so we decided not to re-invent the wheel, but take inspiration from the best ones out there, and make them work with our unique online grocery context. We ended up with 5 principles, and tried to document them in detail, with do and don’t to bring them to life and make them actionable for our team members.
Create an experience vision: Ecom 2030
Scaling without a vision is a recipe for disaster. With so many different crafts, talents and opinions working on the same product, it became apparent that we needed a shared vision, something to get us all aligned behind. So working with the entire UX team, as well as contributors from various crafts (engineering, product, data, tech comms, sales…) we set out to create our experience vision: a snippet of how we'd like users to experience our product in the near future. Set in 2030, this experience vision is based on a comprehensive research study and follows users across our 3 main geographies: Europe, North America and Asia.
Themes
To come up with this vision, we first collected a vast amount of data from many different sources: user research insights, competitor benchmarking, technology trends, business mission… and organised all of these into themes. We then weaved a story around these themes, to help bring them to life and make the whole narrative user centric.
These themes are now used in various workshops to guide product outcomes and overall domain strategy. Everything Ecom 2030 is accessible to the entire organisation on an internal website built to store all materials, ready for others to use as needed.
Sustainability
Automation & Inspirartion
Immediacy
Life Assistant
Acquisition
Omni-channel
Building a career model for growth
As the UX Community grew in Ocado Technology, the need to offer practitioners a clear career path became crucial for talent retention, employee satisfaction and personal growth. Working with UX managers, we came up with a resilient career model for all our teams. And since its rollout, this career model helped us successfully promote team members, and better set expectations for new hires.
A clear path
Although we had total freedom to create the career model we needed, we also wanted to keep it aligned with the other disciplines in Ocado Technology as well as industry standards. We looked at the Engineering and Product career models in the company, and best practices across UX in different companies and came up with this one (above pic)
Behavioural & Craft competencies
Looking at what we do everyday (researching, wire-framing, designing, testing…) we started to group these activities into behavioural and craft competencies that we thought were key to a UX practitioner in Ocado Technology (below pic). These competencies are detailed for each level of our career modal, with clear expectations and measures for success.
O!UX 2022
O!UX 2022
In 2022, I started a new initiative to bring the entire UX community of Ocado Tech together (90+ people). Because we’re embedded in our product streams, this structure tend to creates silos, and I wanted to break those to foster a better UX culture. That’s how O!UX is born.
O!UX is our internal UX conference. Across two days and three locations, we had a variety of talks and activities to bring UX closer, learn new things and simply have fun together. The event was a huge success (pics below), with talks on topics like accessibility and strategy, workshops on design trends and social activities like UX Bingo or the award ceremony, recognising achievements from some of our team members.
2023 is already underway, see you in October!
Barcelona teams
Poland teams
UK teams
Aaaand Action!
These two videos give a nice overview of my UX Manager role at Ocado Technology. The first one focuses on what it is to be a leader, taking both craft and people to the next level. The second one is a video about UX I commissioned to help with recruitment. The UX community in the company grew significantly in the past years, and we wanted a video to help us communicate better what we're about to candidates. It dives deeper into the world of UX, the products we work on, our users and what’s it like to work with us. They were both shot by the amazing PR team at Ocado Technology in 2020.