In this talk, the speaker outlines how small UX pods—comprising an interaction designer, a researcher, and a visual designer—fit within cross‑functional product teams that also include product managers, owners, and developers. He explains the need for a higher‑level experience lead who, while not always a manager, ensures the overall user experience is coherent by grooming roadmaps based on business value, user needs, and technical feasibility. The speaker stresses that work is planned at the feature level; releasing partial functionality leads to a "half experience," illustrated with Instagram Reels lacking likes, shares, or saves. He details the technical and analytics dependencies a new feature entails (e.g., reporting, file limits, compression) and how the experience lead coordinates these across platforms. The design workflow is described as a hand‑off from research to interaction design to visual design, with the lead providing the strategic context that individual contributors lack. The talk concludes with a call for audience feedback.
Chapters
So say you have that, those 3, 3 roles, an interaction designer, a researcher, and a visual designer. You have a little pod, right, of UX. Now they work with a cross-functional team, which will be like product management, developers, but then there's like a higher structure that doesn't just do the work, but understands the backlog, understands the plan, helps interpret things. And a lot of times what that'll be is a lead. So you may have, um, product owners that own specific features. Parts of a product or different areas. But usually there's someone above them which will be a product manager. And that's someone who sees the holistic product as itself. Very similar can be done for user experience where you have the pod, people that do interaction design, people that do visual design, people that do research and how it's scattered and how it's— you might need more. You might need one per product, but you usually have a similar lead that sees the overall experience. Now I've done this at multiple companies where I'm the lead and then I'll delegate the work, you know, as management. But there will also be times where I've seen an experience lead, someone literally dedicated to making sure the experience makes sense. That's not necessarily management. They can be, you know, a senior UX designer or they'll be a product manager that is an experience lead and they'll, make sure the roadmap is groomed based on business value, user need, and technical feasibility. And then creating a roadmap that is then broken into epics and features and scheduled, and the work is done. From the UX standpoint, more getting into that process, a lot of the work is done at the feature level, understanding the entire feature, because you can't release a feature partially. That will be a half experience, right? Imagine if Instagram released Reels, but you weren't able to like them or share them or save them. It was just watching the video. It would be half an experience. It would be a poor experience. So that's why it takes the combination of an experience, experience lead to know who's gonna be needed, how it's gonna affect other things. The truth of the matter, if you think about Reels as an example, you need analytics on Reels. So there may be a separate section in the account section that gives you details about it. So like reporting. You need the interaction with Reels. You need to make sure that there's a file limit and compression. So how it works technically, there's a lot that goes into it. And it's not just one area of your app, it's an entire feature. They released a feature and said, hey, this is new, you can use it. It does this, it interacts with the component. If you release pieces of that, it wouldn't be functional. It'd be, it would be a poor experience. So understanding what goes into that feature a lot of the times is done by the the lead, the experienced lead or the manager, whoever really can see that and say, "This feature touches this product, touches this product, touches this product," or this area of the product if it's one product. You may need it on the app, you may need it on the web. There is a different kind of role in terms of strategy than actual individual contributor. As an interaction designer, you're consuming the research, you're looking at the research, you're looking at visual inspiration, you're looking at competitive research. Competitive apps and competitive analysis and saying, okay, we could put this here and it can go like this and it'll have a button here. You click this, it'll go to this page, you fill out this information, it does this, and that's the end of that flow. Then from here you can go through this flow, then you pass it over to the visual designer who does that. But someone also needs to help identify where it's gonna be. And maybe the interaction designer can do that, but having the understanding and the assumptions of what this is gonna be and where it goes, is usually done by some kind of lead, and you have different levels. You may have different, you know, different pods or different groups or value streams that require someone to oversee the experiences holistically. So if this makes sense to you, feel free to like and subscribe. If you have any thoughts about it, or maybe I missed something, go ahead and chime in. Love to hear it. All right, thanks for listening. Talk to you later.
