About wareFX

Two years in my career, I made myself a promise that I would never own and protect knowledge for job security. I decided that I would always equip the people I lead with my acquired skills to the point they could replace me. It was an example of a double edge sword. If I trained and mentored what I was good at, it allowed the company to grow capacity in what I did and it also created personal space to grow in other areas. While user experience remained a passion, I wanted to go deeper. I got the opportunity to continue to work in user experience, while developing products for the market research industry. I knew I had a lot to learn from the market research industry to strengthen my research abilities. After all, the market research industry seeks understanding through validation against actual and potential customers.

I got into a smaller Market Research Tech company that was building products using waterfall methodologies. I was brought in for user experience and I went straight for the shock that would transform their product development culture. I on-boarded right in the middle of the design phases of a large R&D project to create a platform that would house their entire suite of online market research products. In order to have impact on those designs in a short period of time, I knew I had to have a culture change across the entire team.

I ran a few user experience studies against existing products and leveraged the videos to train usability to the product development team as I had successfully done in the past. We had a huge opportunity to build user experience in a new platform and set the tone for all products coming into the platform in the future. We developed our user profiles, and built design standards that were implemented in the platform architecture. We focused on consistency of experience across all the products that would eventually come into the platform.

As part of this development undertaking, we needed to be faster at product development with little room for error. Common sense said it was much cheaper and easier to fail at the beginning of a project therefore we took out our papers and pencils and started to be a lot more intentional about low profile designs. We also put a lot of thought into how we could work this into our software development processes. I would often see experts debating whether usability processes can work with agile development environment. Based on the requirement for design and validation iterations in user experience, my answer was often in the form of a question: How can user experience processes work without the iterative nature of agile software development methodologies? If we were going to go through a culture change in user experience, why not take a look at our software development processes and interweave user experience and agile development in that change.

Moving forward with an agile development methodology, I was adamant that we would use an Agile on Agile approach to our development processes. Meaning, we were going to add a continuous improvement model to our agile processes. Essentially, it’s what I coined Agile on Agile. In the first year, we worked hard to evolve and personalize our processes. It really became the only thing we were striving to never being Done. We were poised to continuously evolve. Once again I was excited to transfer my abilities to the team and create space where I could also have an impact on the overall business. When I first started, everyone in the company was pointing to the software team as a problem in the company and through results we turned into the team to be emulated by other departments for success. For example, the company mandated a corporate standup every week for every department to stand up to review what was done in the past week and what was planned for the following week. We had a corporate wall with all our department promises that kept our corporate progress transparent.

In a short period of time, this lead to my appointment as VP of Product Development. I had successfully trained and transferred much of my ux and agile development skills to a point where I had created space to focus more on business development at the corporate level. In this role, I had the opportunity to work with client executive teams working on deals that would adopt the integration of our products within their market research service offering.
During this time in the MR industry, I also had the unique opportunity to work with Jefferey Hayzlett who chaired our board for a few years. I learnt a lot from Jeff with regards to no nonsense common sense business practices. He’s an electric character that is filled with passion and experience at the c-suite level and as a celebrity figure. I would highly recommend reading any of his books. If we ever do business together, ask me about the time he threatened to fire me during an executive meeting using a dramatic Celebrity Apprentice approach. It’s a good one!