Title: On UX Leadership
Context: Your organization’s user experience teams are only as effective as the people who lead them.
Synopsis: Probably the biggest gap in most organizations’ user experience teams is quality leadership. Talent can exist in spades. Research, process, tools can all be effectively leveraged to give a UX team the ammunition required to succeed. But, if there is a gap at the leadership level (or indeed levels) then the people on the ground – through no fault of their own – are dead in the water. The fact that UX is a nascent part of the vast majority of most companies means that by definition there will not always be the talent in place to lead the whole organization towards a well articulated vision of where they need to be. We also need to understand exactly what UX leadership means. Not all of this responsibility should fall on the shoulders of a single individual. No, true leadership should be endemic to the whole UX organizational structure and takes many forms beyond that of visioneer. Part of the job description of each and every user experience practitioner on your payroll should be a leadership role in some quantifiable form. Leadership is measured by results, so until UX becomes a fact of life, we all need to spend more time leading and less time hoping someone else will.
Best Bit: “If we are to overcome our biggest challenges–growing our profession and injecting design into the DNA of our organizations–we must find ways to foster UX leadership.”
via uxmag.com
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