via smashingmagazine.com => original post link
You can incrementally advance corporate UX maturity by conducting user research, designing new features, and repairing existing ones while emphasizing how your work improves the user experience. Experts agree this approach is effective, but it may take long before the company truly groks and values UX. To accelerate culture change, you must find and solve a big unmet user need. But an innovative solution is not enough; you must also successfully navigate UX politics to see your project through to deployment.
During most of my jobs in UX leadership roles over the past 40 years, my teams and I resigned ourselves to making incremental improvements to legacy products and force-fitting new features into existing design frameworks. As a result, appreciation of UX advanced gradually, starting with our development and product management partners and later expanding to other parts of the organization as our contributions gained recognition. But while UX awareness expanded, UX maturity did not increase appreciably.
Whenever I tried a bottom-up approach, driving UX innovation as an individual contributor or front-line manager, I frequently ran into territorial disputes or Not Invented Here (NIH) obstacles. While my colleagues in the development and product management never explicitly said so, the unspoken message was, “That’s not your job. That’s my job. UX needs to stay in its lane.” UX should not be proposing new development projects or creating a vision for future products; these are the exclusive engineering and product management domains.