The story about the portal is less about the UX process - while important - it was about the experience of being the lead UX designer on a greenfield product team, and how that team learned to build a product together. How that team stuttered, stopped, reset but ultimately succeeded in launching a product less than a year later - all the while learning and establishing the agile development process that would be the standard for Westfield product teams moving forward.

The product team consisted of a design team (UX, UI designers), front-end developers, product team (managers and owner), API engineers, data engineers, testers, business analysts, and business stakeholders.

There was no existing product team or process to guide us as we began this process - and as a self-managing product team, we had to learn to walk before we could run. Which involved a ton of falling down and starting over again. This was evident as we began to establish our team norms and processes. Team members had their own past experiences building web applications or digital products, some familiar with agile and others not. After a few leadership changes, we were able to establish ‘our’ agile process - and slowly were beginning to get our designs from concepts to working code.

The only online functionality that Westfield provided its current customers was an external marketing site and access to a 3rd party payment system (Paymentus) that allowed customers to make online payments.

From a product perspective, our goals were to provide more self-service features for our customers (view claims, policy, ID cards, agent information, and make payments via the portal).

The design team was able to begin its early concept and research work - but from a development perspective, we were stuck fast. How would the build team start to consume the designs we were beginning to create and turn them into working code?

As a member of the design team, we were responsible for the entire design process - concept exploration, discovery, wireframes, prototyping, creating and moderating user studies - to the polished hi-fi design for the product.

As the project team continued to evolve and learn the agile process, the design team also had to learn how to work in harmony with the dev team - creating the designs that would support the products features and business goals, and supporting the dev team as they began to consume and build our designs out in the dev, test and prod environments.

This idea of design and dev working together - going from - concepts > hi-fi designs > working code - took a while before we felt that we were working in sync, as a singular team. It seemed that we were actually two separate teams, a design team using our own methodologies and process, and a build team using the agile dev process to create working code. It took a lot of work, relationship building, and empathy to ultimately get to the point where I could comfortably see we were a single team with a cohesive understanding of the design and dev process and how both teams could work together and need each other throughout that process.