My monthly journal about the journey to transform Hook&Loop and #ensw

Whoah baby, I apologize for the 20 day tardiness on this post. Tail-end of January into February was off the hook intense. In the spirit of holding onto a commitment, here’s my January post—not only late but a bit shorter than I intended. At least it’s something. 😵

Whoah 👶 — Biggest Success

The Enterprise that People Want—is the enterprise I want to build

In response to the announcement that Infor is looking to go public in the future, our CEO, Charles Philips said that the market should see Infor as “the enterprise that people want.” That translates into an enterprise where the experience rules. That’s the enterprise I want my team to design, engineer and support.

Hook&Loop on Twitter

Watching @cpinfor discuss the investment and positioning for IPO #cnbc #IPO #ensw

Two years ago, we presented a mobility strategy for Infor, the Personal Enterprise, as we reconfigured the business model and work processes for Hook&Loop. We’ve been building, supporting and delivering outputs that support that idea ever since.

In the time that design has had a seat at the Infor table, Hook&Loop has been operationalizing and scaling human-centered outcomes. Moving to the beat of “the product is the brand, the brand is the product,” a phrase that our CEO has said himself. Our dedication to evolving the Design System and changing the conversation in the ways we engage and scale new experiences through the native mobile apps we are building.

It’s important to me and my team to validate that the end-user experience is a priority at Infor as a way to differentiate itself in the market.

Aww 💩: Biggest Opportunity to Learn

Missing our CRM Release became an eye-opening experience

We were tracking to have Mobile CRM (v1) for iOS to be GA at the end of January. We missed this milestone. That alone isn’t great, but what we uncovered was worse. We didn’t follow through. We went into the dev-ops deployment with assumptions that other members within other teams were going to ensure the app’s success.

Big learning for us: assumptions cannot be the way we move forward. If we were being thorough, we could have caught what we didn’t see. We must pay attention to every detail along the way and confirm our assumptions before it’s too late. Now the first release is tracking for March 18 and we’re using the delay to our advantage — building more functionality into v1. This will include automation for call logs, file attachment support (internal/external) along with haptics & sound.

We’re learning. Don’t assume. Roll with the punches. Capitalize on unexpected time.

Scale value across the spectrum

I want our business model, design process and engineering outputs to compound value across Infor’s product offerings. I believe that outside of the extensive configuration capabilities that we deliver to our customers in empowering their IT department — we need to activate and empower their people in ways that offer multiple ways to access and engage at work.

According to Zero to One’s The Future of Progress, we can juxtapose our native mobile outputs to the long-tail efforts of our design system. This needs a more in-depth blog post from me to explain this strategy, but it’s about addressing current and emerging work needs in ways that extend our solutions for the generation to come. I’m excited about where this strategy will take our work and how it will amplify its impact.

NRF2019: Engineer’s storytelling

Every year Infor attends NRF to showcase the latest solutions and customer outcomes, we also welcome guests to HQ, and I am often asked to participate in these presentations. While I enjoy having the opportunity to interact with customers — existing and potential, the requests are exceeding my availability.

This year I asked Ben Fenton, who leads the engineering teams at Hook&Loop, to fill in for me. I heard positive feedback about Ben’s presentations and what he captured from the inputs of the visitors that could impact our work. Engineers have a unique view of what can be done, and that gives customers and potential customers a different perspective on our organizational strategy. I must do more of this. It’s an opportunity for others to have a chance to represent the organization and gain confidence in telling the Hook&Loop story. Creating a greater sense of purpose around our mission.

I ❤️ team

For 2019, we are mapping team member growth to our company values. The criteria is being the member who has the most exemplified — many if not all of — Infor’s values:

• A sense of urgency
• A passion for customer success
• A thirst for innovation
• A focus on results
• A sense of community

#CrushIt for January
Nick Wynja
Product Manager, Design System

Nick was our first recognized member given his proactive nature in the design tokens with our development teams, dynamic real-time feedback in our design reviews as well as ensuring design-ops within the Design System can happen continuously. One of the biggest takeaways was in his disposition with embracing change and activating the larger team with his agenda.

January bday shout outs to Elizabeth Hartley, Elan, Johnny P, Randy, and Terrance, Henry, Janah in Manila—what a celebratory month.

Kudos to Danielle 1️⃣, Melanie 3️⃣ and Chuck 5️⃣ for the Infor—Hook&Loop anniversaries.

My monthly journal about the journey to transform Hook&Loop and #ensw

Many of us in NY and the Philippines (not forgetting our remote US team members 🍻) enjoyed some time off before ringing in the New Year. It was well earned after the momentum we built in 2018. Last year’s journey at Hook&Loop was all about Infrastructure:

Establishing a process, culture, and value contribution at scale that addresses user and business need—today and tomorrow.

The team began 2018 not really trusting each other collectively and without a shared belief in what we were doing—no clear roles and lines of ownership; nor the ability to clearly articulate the value contribution we were making. As a result, some of our talent departed making the opportunity to develop a new business model: four UX services emerged including native mobile work based on all the best that SaaS delivery has to offer. As each month passed we made progress as a team delivering work that fulfills our strategy.

I believe that the work is the culture. I started seeing better collaboration, deadlines being met, deliverables that exceed what was promised or expected. We even began having the conversations that went beyond the work towards creating a healthier org that cares about each of our personal well-being. Monthly strategy reviews are driving accountability and strengthening our unity. In the last months of 2018, there was excitement around the shared belief that we could really achieve what we set out to do.

I am grateful for the team members who took this journey with me, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy to for us to unify. Together we changed the work and our relationship, and our delivery at Infor. I can’t wait for 2019—the year we grow beyond the walls of development and better position our outputs in the market. Thank you Loopers—vets and newbies—for stepping up with me and committing to our work.

Whoah 👶—Biggest Success

A different perspective validates what you already thought you knew

I hate to fly so I was glad that three of our team members were excited to travel to Sweden for Infor’s M3 TechEd, to talk to not only power-users of M3, but also IT decision makers who are keen to hear about enhancements and plans for future innovation.

Here’s what was different — and exciting — about this user conference: The new H&L showed up to present and fact find. You can check out the team’s account of their experience below ⬇️

Hook&Loop Experiences M3

After 18+ months of figuring out what we believe and how to deliver, we now have a shared organizational POV on User Experience with the most strategic ways to scale it back into the enterprise. While the team was there to listen, they were also there to present and evangelize the new H&L processes that’s the result of our collected intelligence. And guess what? It was well received, got lots of attendees engaged in the conversation, and validated our gut instinct on what to evolve.

Demonstrating the desirability of our processes and work, we’ve already had the CSI and Infor Nexus teams tell us they want what we’re offering. But it took our team traveling to Stockholm to prove to us that we have a pulse on what the product experience needs to be.

Aww 💩: Biggest Opportunity to Learn “for me”

Operating in multiple dimensions as an Infor Exec

A few weeks back, we had our annual Leaders’ Summit with strategic meetings around all areas of Infor’s business. It was a mad scramble for me — the day before given the last minute invitation to demonstrate UX progress in product. It turned out somewhat successful — highlighting the positive changes, but to be honest I wasn’t able to fully seize the opportunity.

There were a few times that I should have been better prepared, especially due to our unique perspective on Customer Service via mobile. I would have loved to be on the docket to discuss the Design System program, adoption and demand for the new version—how it decreases time in implementation.

Lesson learned. It’s hard to get ahead of every chance you have to delivery your story. Especially when you have to piggy-backing off of our development colleagues’ presentation. At times, being a corporate exec I loose sight of this—I still want to feel like I am part of my team that’s doing—lesson is that you need to be more vigilant about having stories ready to go. Without losing the passion and drive like when I ran my own company. I have a global team and a C-Suite that’s counting on me for very different things. My challenge for 2019 is to represent Hook&Loop, represent Infor and still be me.

Infor on Infor + Hook&Loop

Our Business Innovation team (IT) has a mandate to get Inforians on latest version of our products, at times even before they are available. This helps to ensure we deliver the best customer experience. The three mobile products Hook&Loop has been design-leading are already in the mix.

1. HCM Mobile Optimized—beta 2000 employees at the moment
2. Infor CRM Mobile: Scheduled evaluation call for January
3. Infor Expense: Onboarding at the current moment

Major win here: we get more immediate, unfiltered feedback from users who have a vested interest in the success of the product. There’s something really powerful having a conversation in the elevator with a colleague who you happened to run into about their experience with one of the apps. It can happen to anyone of us here at HQ — and you never know who’s going to offer feedback — or what they’re going to say. It’s a great way to keep us on our toes — ready to talk about our decisions and learning to probe for more details and actionable insights.

Keeping the excitement and urgency alive one second at a time

We track progress and demonstrate our outputs by targeting them to Inforum, our global user-conference. When the NYC team came back to the office on January 2, they were greeted by a countdown clock. September 23 in New Orleans might feel like a distant future but it will be here before we know it. Here is to sticking to our plans!

Soft launch: H&L site and new branding for 2019

Congrats to the team for launching V1 of our new website right before the holidays. We have aggressive plans for a more robust V2 launch at the end of March. What’s really important about this experience is the new look and feel for the H&L brand. We’ve purposely kept the H&L branding minimal which really allows our work to stand out and speak for itself.

I keep saying that the Product is the Brand and the Brand is the Product — so it’s time to start walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

Hook and Loop

Shoutout @j_macaluso for walking the walk too—building out and enhancing the overall site experience.

TechTalks: Artificial Neural Networks

Big shoutout to Luca Columbu, our Lead Mobile Development Manager for orchestrating H&L’s first TechTalks. The inaugural topic was Artificial Neural Networks and the fundamentals around what it is, how data is used (training/test) and a practical example to help arm the team in our mobility decision making. In the spirit of sharing, here are the references from the sess:

Some references are here:

• Neural Networks and Deep Learning Free Online Book
  http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/index.html
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
  ttps://www.amazon.com/dp/9332543518/?coliid=IZVMODEFA8SV4&colid=382Z5TH4EBXP1&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it
• On Intelligence (general public book about AI/Human Brain) https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Understanding-Creation-Intelligent-Machines/dp/0805078533
• TensorFlow Docs
  https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/keras/

The first invite was sent out as a trial to Hook&Loop, but we have plans to open it up to all HQ employees and via webcasts.

Solution Consultants are on point

Erik Traverner, a solution consultant for Infor’s CX suite visited our team in NYC to talk about market saturation, competitive landscape, and where we should head with CRM. The discussion and its outcomes led our team looking at what we are building with a different lens — and to identifying a way of adding additional value all while differentiating our CRM app.

I always had a feeling that Infor’s SCs could be uber helpful to our team, and this session validated that. SCs are the closest to our customers with their needs while keeping a close eye on what the market is doing — or say they are doing. A good product/service is one that captures a user’s needs and differentiates the offering. Next visit you get a t-shirt and please consider yourself a Looper!

Bringing in the Holidays

Nunzio Esposito on Twitter

Christmas came early for @hookandloopnyc NYC... hope the team enjoys a mean espresso go forward! ☕️🇮🇹

An H&L holiday tradition is the team White Elephant ($20 limit!). This year’s gift exchange did not disappoint — either with unexpectedly great gifts (gift cards, wireless mobile charge pad, Amazon Echo Dot) which made the swapping fierce and those other gifts that are likely to reappear at next year’s White Elephant. But everyone’s a winner this year — I got a Gaggia Brera Espresso Machine for our floor (and it’s awesome, if I say so myself). Freshly ground beans beat the pre-packaged Flavia machine every time.

I ❤️ team

December bday shout outs to Becca, Julie and Oge and thanks to Thea for coordinating the killa dilla burrito birthday lunch in celebration.

Two new members are joining our team in January: Welcome Gaetano Pollice who will lead Program Management, and Kenton Quatman, a Product Designer transferring internally from Infor’s Digital Transformation team. Welcome back to Hook&Loop, playa 😉!

My monthly journal about the journey to transform Hook&Loop and #ensw

Welcome to my world

My intent for these journal entries is to capture the moments of traction, obstacles and occasional defeats that we, meaning Hook&Loop, face. We continue to evolve our organization to make UX impact at Infor through our actions.

ENSW is a beast—vast and complex. As problem solvers we use our skillsets broadly to test, strive and deliver at scale. These decisions cause a domino effect due to all the areas they manifest, making strategic calls feel daunting. Sometimes we fail, but through our failures we learn which could be the biggest value of all.

Since taking the lead at Hook&Loop (May 2017), I have learned so much and realized I wasn’t ready for what I would encounter. The team wasn’t either because we were all coming from different experiences with their own complexity of problems, yet we were collectively challenged to drive change. I knew that doing something was key, and that’s what we did. By Inforum2018 (September: 15 months later), it was clear that we are actually beginning to do something that was working.

I know that I am feeling it, the team feels it and you just feel it in the office—team meetings, design reviews and monthly product stream strategy sessions. We’ve progressed from just defining how we want to work, to actually working that way, fostering better conversation, becoming more transparent with Infor, its customers and end users.

Hook&Loop leads by design while proving out the power of being design-led to transform people, processes, and products—in the context of Infor. If you care about enterprise software, design, the emerging workforce, mobility, or just new ways of figuring shit out, I hope you’ll join me on this journey.

Feel free to comment, share, or simply clap. All is welcomed!

Whoah 👶—Biggest Success

Minimal effort with maximum reward within a week

Kyriba, a SaaS-based treasury solutions provider and an Infor Partner, worked with Joseph on our team in Manila to leverage our design system to revise their product in the context of Infor. They applied our assets to their software, within key workflows to drive an integrated look and feel. It was a pleasure meeting Ramsey Saab, global VP of Sales, to hear the badass news.

Aww 💩: Biggest Opportunity to Learn

Attack process paralysis collectively

For years we worked within a Design System model (Soho) that used command and control to try to scale better UX across Infor—while it achieved consistency and continuity the 4-year investment was clunky. Evolution was slow, adoption was difficult, and it fundamentally alienated design progress given the process. A 1 hour meeting across leadership, product design, the design system turned into a 3+ hour meeting asking the hard questions: “What if we didn’t do product design at all, or took a stance on the development engagement, or went into an entirely new direction?”

When we, as a team, opened ourselves up to solving a different problem (Why try to fix when there’s an opportunity to work differently?), we found a new way of working that helps us re-purpose previous efforts, scales quicker, and lets us drive more impact and value for Infor. 4 years in the making, a 210 minutes of discussion enabled us to realize we have a goal and a means for traction in the next 4 months. Boom baby!—nice job IDS for addressing the infrastructure to better enable our design community.

Loopers in the wild
Not only does he always have the sickest sneaker game here, but Elan was interviewed for the #PeopleNerds series on data collection. While he is busy hardening our Infor CRM Mobile app, its always good to know we are out in the wild contributing to and learning from the industry.

Best Practices for Researchers on Coding and Tagging Qualitative Data

Amazon to NYC: What happens to our talent pool?
When Amazon announced Long Island City as its new HQ2 I felt mucho concerned about retaining our amazing team members and hiring new members. I just had to reach out to our SVP of HR and our CEO. While I saw the glass half empty, they both saw it half full — that the diversity in the talent pool will expand, welcoming more people to this area and giving us access to an expanded pool of talent. I appreciated the differing view point.

Amazon selects New York City and Northern Virginia for new headquarters

Inforum2019: Hook&Loop OKRs
We level-set every year using Infor’s user forum — rather than aligning with the fiscal year — as the target for demonstrable impact. This constantly reminds us of what is most important: user satisfaction via product.

Here is what we are striving for:

• Design, Develop and Deliver—3 Hook&Loop mobile applications
• Evolve our Assets—Version 5 of our design system is broadcasted
• Optimize Collaboration—H&L Manila evolves the current product development process
• Drive Market Demand—Reposition Hook&Loop, foster market partnerships and build a talent pool for growth (Promote within first)

Infor’s mobile enterprise gateway
Within Infor there are different viewpoints on what a “Broad & Shallow” experience needs to support at an integrated suite experience for end-users. From our perspective we need to capitalized on our current offering and design a path forward that marries enterprise R&D enhancements and user acceptance through reduction and aggregation principles. Making good on the broad and shallow authoring a lightweight experience that surfaces up meaningful interactions and helps navigate the complexity of the deep and narrow power of our purpose-built apps.

On24 for Infor Expense
Big shout out to the team and Melanie for representing Infor Expense on a public-facing webinar, articulating the app’s value and our positioning on mobility within the enterprise. The key milestones this year rely heavy on ML and integration to keep the on-the-go business user productive and satisfied.

Faster, easier expense management on the go

Fashion Institute of Technology: Think Tank & Intern Review
Our partnership with FIT via the Infor/FIT Design & Tech Lab (DTech) lets us engage with the next generation work force on a couple levels. We’re giving students and faculty access to business software to help solve real world problems in the lab and welcoming interns at Hook&Loop where they work side by side with our team. Two presentations at Infor this month — one on the partnership and work in the lab in general and one where the students presented the work they have done in the lab and at H&L, were amazing. Biggest takeaway — I can’t believe how well the students articulated the business need and design decisions they made. Looking forward to making a few of them full-time Loopers by Summer 2019.

Infor Design and Tech Lab - FIT Newsroom

Rebranding Hook&Loop
Given we are in our 6th year and transforming the organization means that the brand and our assets need to reflect our mission and support a more human view of our identity. The team has been exploring our ampersand to make it more representative of our product development process at Infor and give it a visual relationship to the Infor square logo. Mobile is authoring a new future state for H&L and Infor and we believe the brand needs to reflect the human-centeredness of the experience.

Curious about your thoughts as we finalize our new mark to launch in the New Year!

I ❤️ team

Welcome back Becca from your wedding and honeymoon (congrats!) — glad you’re here because we need you heavy on M3.

Nothing’s more exciting that new team members: 2 new designers have joined our team in Manila. Your contribution is creating space for our org to evolve strategically. THANKS!

Our two interns from FIT just rock! We’re lucky to have you on the team. Fashion Institute of Technology should be super proud of you!

At our annual user conference, Inforum2018, I had the chance to speak about the need for Infor’s product strategy to begin to account for each individual user’s preferences. The idea of accommodating for user choice and control creates, what I like to call, the personal enterprise. To deliver that means maximizing configurability beyond personalization — and that’s the insane design challenge we’re facing at Hook & Loop.

Segment of one is the personal enterprise

A couple weeks before Inforum, an article in the New York Times (August 5) called The iGen Shift, made me pause and then blurt out “Whoa Baby!” because it was so serendipitously aligned with the way we’ve thinking for the past year. The article focuses on how colleges and universities are changing the ways they educate and serve iGen’ers, born between 1995 and 2012, to accommodate for their behavior, expectations, and relationship with technology. For me this shift in user demands will have dramatic implications on enterprise software as iGen enters the workforce.

In the article, Thomas Golden of data firm Capture Higher Ed predicts group designations will evolve into “segments of one,” because

“…they expect to be treated as individuals. Students raised amid the tailored analytics of online retailers or college recruiters presume that anything put in front of them is customized for them.”

Future enterprise solutions, used by thousands or even tens of thousands of employees at a company, will need to feel like they’ve been specially designed for each user. Most enterprise providers, including Infor, are already knee deep in delivering consumer-grade experiences that satisfy the Millennial generation — while also dealing with legacy systems, fragmented integrations, the disparate needs of casual vs. super-users, and older mental models for how workflows should render. Now, the emerging iGen work force is ramping up the experience challenge for enterprise solutions.

Mobility mind shift isn’t about the size of the screen.

We’ve begun to solve the challenge through the lens of mobile.

More workers are disconnecting from physical office spaces and the work culture is becoming more connect-at-your-convenience. Mobile apps will help users stay connected and work like they want to work via the device they prefer — their smart phones.

Mobile experiences empower users to be more in control of their lives because work becomes accessible and flexible in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

For businesses, mobile is the right kind of connectedness to employees — extending just the essential functionality from the enterprise to meet the employee’s immediate needs while keeping data centralized, current, accessible and secure.

Mobile drives user satisfaction and customer success. The goal is to optimize the utility of the software and the usability of the experience — and when combined create the ultimate success for a mobile solution: desirability, which ensures adoption and use — not just because they have to use it, because they want to use it.

Mutual Benefit is Mutual Satisfaction

These experiences are designed and built with contextual intelligence to inform or guide users to effective results. (iGen users like guidance when learning something new, so we’re getting closer to giving them what they want.) So when users want to use an app, we can scale those experiences — lightweight, easy-to-navigate, highly efficient, productive — back into the enterprise driving greater user satisfaction and business success.

To orchestrate these experiences — which include distilling unprecedented amounts of work and personal data — we can’t do it effectively it with just modern UI and UX best practices. The challenge is to create user experiences that are flexible, easy to navigate and intuitive — on every device and at every point within a work flow for every user.

We follow these tenets to deliver against our strategy:

• User expectations extend beyond consumer-grade
  We know user choice & control, an intimate relationship with the device, and multi-purpose/multi-function devices are redefining what drives high engagement and success
• Mobility is about all devices
  We always account for people, situational context, business process, and the integration/aggregation of data
• Device capabilities & computing
  Solutions should work in harmony with device computing and the enterprise platform’s capabilities to offer leading-edge experiences
• Agility with human-centered product development
  We’re modeling and teaching a new way of working because enterprise development has to deliver with shared accountability and shared success
• API Design is the biggest business outcome
  We formulate new abilities to render an experience in one solution and share them with other areas of the enterprise to amplify the impact and ROI of our work.

Choice and control are the new experience

Here’s how we amplify the benefit for Infor, its customer and its users — by sharing APIs, workflow solutions, use cases, and a dynamic, open-source design system, we’re making these highly optimized, highly desirable user experiences device-agnostic and scaling them into the enterprise.

That’s why as mobility becomes the future of work, mobile really is the future of the enterprise.

As we move forward, part of our role at Hook & Loop is to understand when it’s right for a solution to be a stand-alone, purpose-built application (narrow and deep), or when it should be part of an aggregated solution that provides access to multiple, lightweight workflows that the user needs (broad and shallow). Sometimes it needs to be both or even maybe none-of-the-above.

We can allow for cross-app conversation within a workflow or business object by enabling the device (OS) to handle the connection between the two and quickly load to where a user has left off. We can deploy AI to handle all the background processes and focus the user on essentials: activating, confirming, approving — this allows for assistance and automation to happen per user, on all of their devices.

There are multiple ways to handle workflows. From an experience perspective this is ideal because, for example, when users do some actions infrequently, they build confidence more quickly with a single application that handles all their needs.

But here’s what’s important: it’s not about needing to have one app for each product. It’s about offering users a choice — a purpose-built application when the work requires deeper functionality or a catch-all for lightweight needs. I don’t believe you can have one without the other.

Native apps drive the API needs and push the responsive boundaries to enable designer and developers to deliver the most advanced UX. Those APIs democratize the connections and allow for responsive to evolve. More importantly, native provides a test bed, given the lifecycle of the device, that gives us opportunities to create more capabilities, faster technology, and easier integrations.

It’s an enterprise ecosystem of experiences that will enable us to all do what’s best for the user, because that’s ultimately what’s best for the business.

The iGen has thrown down the gauntlet for those of us who wake up every day thinking about user experience. Their demands for experiences that feel like they have been created just for them is an enormous challenge. But the kinds of experiences we’re envisioning — always, only, exactly what the user needs right now™ — and incrementally building toward at Hook &Loop are going to meet not only the expectations of the iGen work force but also of whatever generation comes next.

Just wait until the teams at Hook & Loop can really embed and activate Infor Coleman (Infor’s AI) into our workstreams. Or when we’re able to offer multiple ways to engage — data entry, AR, video/broadcast — to tailor the experiences and redefine the relationship between users and their work. The possibilities are limitless, and our enterprise offering will never be the same.

Press Release on Infor Expense
Press Release on Infor Go

One of the things that I am passionately committed to is establishing an organization where the culture is defined by the work. When I introduced this idea, it was met with some skepticism. I understand the skepticism because I was leading the team into a realm of unknowns — about me, the way we’d work with Infor and its customers, and the value we’d add. Even with all that uncertainty, here’s why I believe focusing on the work is the right way to define and build culture.

At Hook & Loop we define our work as our process as well as the outputs and outcomes. When you articulate the expectations around how we operate and interact, a culture of shared accountability and shared success emerges.

Our five principles below establish us as makers, solution-orientated, and here to deliver real value. They form a unifying code of conduct that transcend projects, disciplines and roles.

1. We collaborate and share selflessly
   We’re open to feedback and new ideas
   We are not here to do things we’ve done before
   We make decisions based on evidence
   We are not motivated by ego
2. We love small, self-sufficient teams
   We are lean
   We are empowered to be self-directed and accountable
   We learn our way forward
3. We are customer and user obsessed
   We care about our customers’ success
   We are empathetic to our users
   We do more than what is asked
4. We make things real, fast and frequently, and sometimes we fail
   We believe in delivering fast and frequently
   We see our work as infinitely iterative
   We avoid perfection paralysis
   We find success in failure
5. We are committed to our people who are committed to the work

When you empower your team members to seize the opportunity—take control of their own professional destiny, iterate and learn, not be afraid of failure you demonstrate your commitment to them as valuable contributors to your organization.

We provide the framework for empowerment at all levels of the organization. We promote transparency and move aware from control toward mentorship and guidance.

Why is that fundamentally so important? Because when things change — market needs, work streams, even team configurations — the culture does not have to change with them. When the work is the culture and the culture is the work, there is never any question about what’s important, how team members can contribute and what success looks like. You’ll know what to expect and what’s expected of you and your colleagues. It’s this kind of culture where team members outgrow our organization and move on become the future leaders at Infor and within the industry. That to me is proof that an organization’s culture is working.

I’m a designer — previously a UX Design Director and now the head of Hook&Loop and VP of Experience at Infor, a global enterprise software company where we utilize the power of design-thinking to discover all possible solutions. Then by putting design into execution, we become design-led — iterating our hypothesis rapidly not only for definition but to continuously enhance it and keep it moving.

I am also an entrepreneur, a prior business owner (acquired in 2011) and an adjunct professor. I like to think that I have a broad view and a deep appreciation of the spectrum of issues that confront organizations as they integrate ever-more powerful software solutions to: simplify complex and often international workflows and processes; manage, analyze and try to act on increasingly larger pools of data; and provide their employees and customers with business software tools that work and feel like the consumer grade apps and provide value throughout the experience.

I want to promote the openness to think differently, focus on the user and understand all the ingredients that go into making a stellar product.

Achieving those kinds of experiences — and delivering them at scale in the enterprise — is an enormous and complicated undertaking. Now after more than three years at Infor, I have come to believe that to deliver a user experience that adds value — efficiency, productivity, and results that impact the bottom line — design is not enough.

Don’t get me wrong. Design is important — and super powerful. I am not just saying that because I’m a designer. I am saying that because I believe everyone is a designer — or should be. And by designer, I mean a kick-ass problem-solver. I don’t want to dilute the power of design and have it become a commodity, I want to promote the openness to think differently, focus on the user and understand all the ingredients that go into making a stellar product.

And when everyone is a designer, everything becomes design. Design is more than how it looks. Steve Jobs said: Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Acknowledging that everything contributes to how a product or application works, multiplies the number of ways we can look at solutions. The options for how to address a problem suddenly feel limitless. But with too many options, too many variables can be paralyzing. How do you figure where to begin?

Welcome experience-led.

Experience-led methodology

To deliver the kinds of user experiences in enterprise software that revolutionize the way people and businesses work, we need to get everyone who contributes to the user experience — product managers, dev leads, data scientists, business and industry analysts, sales and marketing teams, services and support division, customers, and design — unified around a shared vision and shared responsibility for delivering the optimal experience.

Everyone, yes everyone, is responsible for the experience. This is the experience-led methodology where everyone is unified around delivering the experience you need to deliver, and that experience defines the strategy and the priorities for the product road map. The experience is greater than the sum of its parts: more than just features and functions, more than just workflows, its more than just sexy screens. It’s the experience — and we’re all a part of it.

Here at Infor we firmly believe that we don’t design features, we build experiences. And we don’t build features that don’t build value for the user.

Hey, and if the experience needs to change along the way or some new reality disrupts the plan, we’re aligned as a team and can pivot in sync — always driving together toward the shared goal of experience, whatever it is and however it needs to be redefined.

To evolve to experience-led teams — with a shared vision and shared accountability — at Infor, we’re starting by changing the way we at Hook&Loop work with our partners internally and externally. It’s about changing mental models around design and process, and we need to embrace it and live it first before we can drive that change from the inside out. We’ve got to change ourselves, before we can ask others to change. And ready for the change.

Our customers and their users are demanding innovative experiences. To make them real, we need to collaborate and operationalize not only participatory design but also service design. Because design is not enough. But then again, neither is tech, or strategy, or anything else. We need to be in this together — if we want to succeed.

Making it real

Design-thinking is good. Design-led is great. Experience-led is even better. But what’s the best? Shipping continuously. How about results today and even bigger results tomorrow? Sound impossible? Or if not impossible, then impractical, right? Wrong!

A dual-track methodology enables us to plot the shared vision for the future state of a user experience onto a product road map. This lets us take into the account the realities — limited resources of people and time — without having to abandon the dream of a future state by delivering incremental enhancements and long term innovation.

Collectively, we can prioritize the innovation — say, easy wins or features that a consensus of users tells us are valuable and impactful — into the build track and ensure that a little of innovation is included in each new product release which will also include of course, all the required elements of the build track — bug fixes, new requirements, etc. If you have six releases a year, those little pieces of innovation begin to add up and suddenly the future state doesn’t seem so far away.

At Infor we firmly believe that we don’t design features, we build experiences.

Internally, we’re embedding cross-functional teams (UX, IA, brand, engagement, strategy) extending beyond Hook&Loop and into the product teams, creating pods that feel almost like dedicated start-ups. These pods will rely on the expertise and insights from other participants — industry/business analysts, data scientists, dev leads and architects, sales and marketing to contribute insights to the vision and help prioritize the innovation track. Everyone contributes. Everyone’s accountable.

Externally, we’ll be leverage even more participation from Infor customers. Customer Advisor Boards will enable us to get regular input about features and functions, as well as feedback through user testing, forums, and other activities. Most importantly, having current customer participate in the creation of the road map and the prioritization of the innovation track will give us a new level of transparency and will help hold us accountable for delivering on our promises.

Here’s the rubber-meets-the-road reality check moment in this methodology: the collaboration around the road map and prioritizing the incremental innovation only works if all parties are sincerely committed to the shared vision. Hook&Loop will be committed and we’ll be holding ourselves and our partners accountable.

But when everyone realizes the payoff is continuous scalable innovation, the ROI of the effort is clear. And everybody wins.

What else is clear?

As a designer, I am a great problem solver. As a designer and collaborator, I am an even better one.

Design is not enough, unless everyone is a designer. And then, design is everything. If experience is the future of the enterprise — and it is — we’ll only get there if we design it together.

Learn more about Hook&Loop and it’s methodology for innovation in the enterprise.

But despite my best efforts–I have become a bottleneck.

Most relevant leaders try to build a transparent culture where everyone contributes value and can share their position and rationale. But especially in creative teams, what ends up happening is that someone needs to make a final call. I remember my early years as a junior designer at my internships, resenting the hold up — the waiting for direction, feedback, or the golden word — approved. “How the hell can it take three days to look over a few screen flows?” As a Creative Director leading a team of 20 creatives (and growing), I’m the one making them wait — between last-minute requests, client calls, status meetings, pitches, presentations, emails on emails on emails, oh boy, I can make them wait.

Although we want things to move forward, most leaders need to be involved in the delivery of work and provide feedback along the way. A leader’s motivation for looking at everything is quality control. It’s not about power, it’s about keeping the vision on track and adopting ideas that have been generated along the way.

Like most creative work, I am a work in progress. Right now, I have five favorite approaches to fight my tendency to become a bottleneck. As I focus on growing the team again with the next wave of hires, these will become invaluable.

1. Trust your people. Hopefully you’ve built an all-star team and have set a high bar for them. Empower them to take ownership over their work. Allow them to make their own mistakes, and encourage them to learn along the way.
2. Know that you can carry a team through its challenges instead of trying to steer them away from them. I have no problem taking the heat if an assignment is late or overdue or misses the mark, and that’s better than giving someone half-assed feedback on my way to another meeting.
3. Don’t ever stop the work. It’s impossible to see all the work at all stages, so let your team know that you expect them to make decisions and move forward when you’re not available. Position yourself as a coach and a tastemaker instead of an approver.
4. Make it clear what you need to be there for and what you don’t. If you’re looked to as the leader, strive to be the glue that comes in at the right moment with the right comment. Embrace the output, know that it’s on track to delight, and own it. Even if it isn’t 100% what you thought it was going to become. Deadlines don’t move.
5. Protect your team and their bandwidth. Saying no to requests is always difficult, but it’s always easier than letting someone down. Less bottlenecks happen when I can be honest with myself and others about bandwidth and I can protect my team from doing more work than they should.

I’m curious to see the coming quarter of this calendar year as I’m looking to hire another ten creatives, and not only be conscience of these five key methods, but also making sure to structure the right layers so that the work can flow seamlessly.