Being agile when building agile UX teams
24
Oct
2019
18:30 - 21:00
Lloyds Banking Group, 48 Chiswell Street, EC1Y 4XX
This month UXPA-UK are jumping into the deep end and will be talking all things agile. Whether you manage a design or research team, are in a design and research team, or are simply curious to understand how you can apply an agile methodology to your ways of working – we’ve got it all.
We have two speakers from the financial services industry that will share insights on how they’re being agile building agile UX teams – one speaker from Monzo who will be speaking from a ResearchOps perspective, and another from Llyod’s Banking Group who will comment on design challenges and the ebbs and flows of the industry.
We hope to see you there!
The Beginnings of Research Operations
To deliver effective solutions to customers on a regular basis, UX teams need to be attentive to customer needs (and unknown needs!), focused on outputs, and flexible with their planning.
If these same UX teams also happen to be in an organisation going through hyper-growth, these requirements are all the more crucial to success. As an organisation reaches a certain size, good Design and Research principles alone are often no longer sufficient to maintain an agile way of working, clearer process becomes needed too, enter Research Operations. Over the last couple of years, more and more Research teams have been creating full-time Operations roles. ResOps has the mission to perfect the research environment to best enable those doing research to be as effective and impactful as possible. Monzo made the decision to create one such role this spring. Here’s a rundown of learnings from those first few months, including tips on remaining agile when setting up a ResOps function, and which projects to prioritise to give the most support to your Researchers.
Through the 2.5 years Kim has spent at Monzo she has seen the business evolve in many ways, for example, going from 170 employees to 1300. The rapid changes she has observed have thrown up a number of unique challenges that make working in an agile way an absolute priority. Her focus has mainly been split between the COps (Customer Service) team, and an Operations role in Complaints, but earlier this year she made the jump over to Design, setting up the brand new ResearchOps function. Prior to Monzo, she worked at a B2B software company specialising in secure collaboration where she worked with both Customer Success and Marketing.
Building Creative Confidence in Agile Environments
Mary is an LBG Design Leads based in the Edinburgh office. She shares some of her first-hand experiences assembling a creative team and explains the challenges involved and the insights she’s gathered.
Mary has worked in incumbent banks for the last 17 years in many guises. In 2010 she realised her curious mind was best fitted to problem-solving. Since then she has held a number of leadership roles in Product Ownership, Digital Strategy, and Design. Mary’s motivation comes from coaching individuals and teams in emerging ways of working to create positive change for customers and organisations.