My role on the project started as a sole UX Designer, transitioning to Senior UX Designer and eventually to Staff UX Designer, leading the team with two other junior UX Designers, with an additional co-op designer.
The decision making process to maximize these levers involved multiple variables: Customer orders, mined components, Clean coal mine inventory, Component blending, Train scheduling, Port stockpile, Vessel scheduling (aligning trains to vessels based on their estimated arrival and berth times - delays here can have high cost)
Project Responsibilities
I’ve started on this project with a 4 people team (PO, Data Scientist, Full-stack Developer and UX), working with a small group of McKinsey consultants. Eventually our CSCR team grew to 30 people, from one product team to 3 cross-functional agile product teams (each product focused separately on short-range, mid-range and long-range planning and optimization models), with dedicated 3 Scrum Masters, following agile methodology.
Initially I was in charge for everything from strategic and product planning to user research to prototyping and user testing across all three products, starting and growing each one from scratch. Later I got help with new UX Designers joining the team, and started focusing more on the strategy, business and stakeholder management, user research, data analysis, while the other designers in the team were co-designing and helping me on the wireframes and prototypes delivery, developer hand offs, and working closely with Deployment Specialists and QA on product and user testing.
I was also responsible for setting up workflows and processes for all teams, started documentation, product style guide, best practices, components and patterns behaviour library, as well as establishing dual-track Design+Development delivery process for all 3 product teams, ensuring shared understanding and long-term vision across all three products, users, front and back-stage processes, alignment, setting up meeting cadences to align UX team with Product Owners, Business Analysts, Deployment Specialists, Value Delivery Managers, business stakeholders; set up workflows and processes for conducting user sessions, UX team syncs with Developers, Data Scientists, Data Engineers and QA. I've worked alongside with Scrum Masters to fully and transparently integrate UX into Agile processes.
