Presentation: Case Study in User-Centered Product Planning & Facilitation - UXPA Boston 2024

Some of us are lucky enough to work with product and engineering who are always aligned, always focused on the right problems, and do a great job communicating. But the rest of us? We’re working with imperfect processes.

In this talk, presented at UXPA Boston 2024, I shared a case study of how UX heavily influenced a yearly product planning cycle in a critical time.

Our UX team accelerated the plan of a face-to-face meeting of 30+ stakeholders from different groups (engineering, product, marketing, documentation, & upper leadership), and centered the user in product planning using UX activities and facilitation skills. We then followed up in the weeks that followed, and over the course of the following year to continue to put the user at the center of our product strategy.

Apart from sharing the details of the product planning meeting, I recapped what has happened on this team and product in the year since the face- to-face meeting. Did UX succeed in centering the user in our processes? Did we build the right things for the right users? How has UX’s role on the team changed? (Spoiler alert: It’s complicated!).

Attendees left this talk with an example of user-centered planning, along with evaluations of what worked well and not-so-well to align product, engineering, and every stakeholder together.

This conference was not recorded, but you can browse the slides below: