“I believe the essence of leadership is understanding and helping humans to be the best they can be. Leading UX requires a diverse team with a truly collaborative culture that encourages creativity in finding optimal user-centric solutions that achieve business goals.
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As Director of User Experience at Nintex, I spearheaded the AI strategy for the UX division, creating a comprehensive framework that balances innovation with usability. I developed guidelines and defined UX patterns for AI integration, ensuring consistent application across products while reducing time-to-market for AI features by 30%.
My approach to AI leadership focuses on three key principles:
This leadership approach resulted in AI features that directly enhanced user productivity and supported sales narratives that influenced enterprise buying decisions.
As a Director of UX, I possess a strong track record of effectively managing and leading a team of full-stack designers across multiple geographical locations, including the US, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. I cultivate a culture of collaboration and accountability, fostered on trust. I strive to create a global design team that embodies a strong design ethos within the organization as a whole.
Given Nintex's diverse product offering, I recognize the importance of cohesive leadership and emotional intelligence to promote cross-platform collaboration across the UX team. I prioritize building trust and confidence within my team by encouraging transparent communication, allowing team members to leverage each other's skills and talents. By establishing trust, my team members can contribute, lead and mentor in their respective areas of expertise while also learning from their trusted colleagues.
Furthermore, I take the time to mentor and support my team from junior members through to managers. I seek to help them expand their knowledge, identifying skill gaps and providing opportunities for career progression. I take a proactive approach to encourage career discussions and support them in creating a development plan that aligns with their goals.
Every UX Designer plays a key role in creating a delightful product. I know that this means that the team must be comprised of a diverse set of skills, tallents, and backgrounds. As such I firmly believe that as a manager I must hire without bias as much is humanly possible. Unbiased hiring means that we need to know the skills of existing team members (supported by defining and evaluating role and skill expectations) and using this knowledge to fill open roles with people who have skills that complement the overall team. With this in mind I have devised a role audition [PDF 113 KB] that allows candidates to demonstrate their skills in a context that makes sense to the interview panel.
This technique has repeatedly proven to hire candidates who hit the ground running and become active contributors in both the product and wider UX teams. I believe this has been the case as the role audition emulates situations that team members experience everyday in the UX team at Nintex. Allowing all those on the interview panel to get a sense of how a candiate would approach real product design interactions.
I work to ensure the whole team adopts an evangelical approach to all aspects of design. This requires a shared understanding of founding design principles that align with the business goals. I understand that teams need cohesive processes that allow them have a shared vision of how to approach design problems and communicate this outwardly with key stakeholders.
I firmly believe that great design is iterative and lean. Designers who live and breathe design know the importance of sketching ideas. I instill a collaborative approach to design with all my staff, scrappy and collaborative design sessions yield the strongest results. Encouraging broad stakeholder feedback early in the design phase means the final design is representative of what is truly feasible.
