In my previous role at Luno in Research Operations, I interviewed a broad range of stakeholders, including executive leadership across the whole business, which gave me a good understanding of high-level strategic requirements and where we were not performing optimally, especially in terms of discovery and delivery.

When I joined the Product wing, I started by conducting a series of in-depth interviews with Product Designers, Team Leads, UX Writers, and Product Managers to understand where the pain points and inefficiencies might be happening - as well as understand where things were working well. I also did daily ethnographic observation of every aspect of the product design process in action, sitting in on various workshops, collaboration sessions, and meetings.

Working closely with the Head of Design and the Senior Manager in the Foundations team, we identified key challenges centred around process, cross-functional team relationships, design culture, organisational design, and roles and responsibilities.

Like any good human-centred designer, I recognised that multi-faceted challenges require multi-faceted solutions co-created with stakeholders, iterated and tested over time.

We worked extensively on roles and responsibilities to encourage transparency, accountability, clarity and autonomy. We created new job levels to align with the global industry and across the whole business. We introduced new design critique panels with senior specialists and encouraged Product Designers and Product Managers to make use of this panel throughout the product design process. We also introduced new channels for designers to request support, guidance, or feedback. We sought to improve efficiency with better prioritisation. We sought to improve quality and innovation by modifying processes to allow more time when needed, and encourage designers to use a broader range of ideation methodologies - and especially by breaking free from design system patterns in Figma and into sketching prototypes on paper. We also started implementing new ways to measure both usability and customer experience so that we could better measure success.

The strategic roadmap for the implementation of these and many other changes formed the basis of our OKRs. I also presented the roadmap for the way forward at the Product Wing All Hands at the start of the year, using the company 'moontalities' to frame this journey.