Indeed identity bridge team

Problem

The authentication and authorization teams were in completely different parts of the organization, but collaboration was needed to execute effectively on initiatives that span both areas, like SSO. A “bridge” team was established to facilitate more collaboration. I was made the UX leader for this team, guiding a cross-disciplinary UX team of 12. We were tasked with improving security, reducing friction, and unblocking employer user growth.

Process

I arranged a team kickoff, established regular team touchpoints, and ensured we were staffed effectively across the UX discipline. I also proactively identified opportunities for my team members and regularly provided guidance on all projects to improve processes and outcomes.

Impact

Across the more than 6 initiatives we launched, our team was able to reduce logins dependent on passwords, increase sign-in success rate, and increase employer user growth.

Setting up the team for success

I was identified by senior UX leaders in multiple orgs as the best person to lead UX for these efforts. The first thing I did in this role was host a kickoff activity for all the UX practitioners that would be involved across design, research, content design, and UI development. My goal was to establish a foundation for collaboration and understand group sentiment on how people were feeling about working together in this new way. This gave me good direction as a leader in terms of where to focus on process improvements and the degree to which the group was aligned on ideas or concerns.

I used the findings from this activity to shape our collaboration processes, which included running a monthly sync together to share progress on initiatives, get design feedback, and knowledge share. I also surfaced highlights from this activity with my cross-functional partners. I shared that UX was missing some clarity on our priorities, which led to a bridge team all-hands to clarify this for all collaborators across functions, and improved alignment for everyone. I followed this up mid-year with an anonymous survey asking team members what I, as a leader, and we, as a group, should stop/start/continue, and maybe adjustments based on this feedback.

Staffing and resourcing

I worked with my team to thoroughly estimate the effort required for planned initiatives. This led to the realization that we were well short of the design resources required to complete all the target initiatives for the year. I shared this with multiple leaders for transparency and considered several approaches to addressing this challenge. I ended up negotiating with a manager on another team to have one of their designers spend half their time supporting our initiatives given the high priority, and the great career growth opportunity it presented for this designer to work on something new and different. I staffed our efforts effectively without costing the company any additional money.

Additionally, there were high-level efforts to reallocate all the UX research resources from all the teams in my purview for this initiative. In response, I worked with my teams to document the expected year’s worth of research efforts and the anticipated risks and work that could not be finished without research resources. I shared this documentation with senior product leadership and the most senior UX research leaders on either side of the bridge team. As a result, I was able to maintain UX research support for our teams.

Presentations to executive leadership

As this was a high-impact and visibility area, the bridge team leadership were expected to provide regular updates to the executive leadership team. I participated in many of these updates directly, but also sought out ways for my team members to participate to leverage these updates as career growth opportunities. A couple times, I asked my team to create recorded demo videos of their work. This made it easy to share in meetings without bloating attendees, give them direct visibility in a lower-stakes medium than a live presentation, and typically create an artifact that served purpose beyond this single use case. When circumstances aligned with live presentations to executive leadership, I coached team members on creating clear, impactful decks, presenting their work in a compelling effective way, and anticipating questions from leadership.

Outcomes and impact

We launched numerous initiatives in the year or so I led this team including SSO, fine-grained permissions, one-time passcodes, and an employer user activity log. In addition to the contributions outlined above, I provided guidance to designers throughout their work on these initiatives on things like how to approach rollout for different audiences to minimize disruptions to users and customer service reps, how to make sure they were taking the full spectrum of users into consideration in their design decisions, and how to come to alignment on an MVP definition when UX and product weren’t intitially on the same page.