User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams

by Arnie Lund

U ser Experience Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams deals with specific issues associated with managing diverse user experience (UX) skills, often in corporations with a largely engineering culture. Part memoir and part handbook, it explains what it means to lead a UX team and examines the management issues of hiring, inheriting, terminating, layoffs, interviewing and candidacy, and downsizing. The book offers guidance on building and creating a UX team, as well as equipping and focusing the team. It also considers ways of nurturing the team, from coaching and performance reviews to conflict management and creating work-life balance. Furthermore, it discusses the essential skills needed in leading an effective team and developing a communication plan. This book will be valuable to new managers and leaders, more experienced managers, and anyone who is leading or managing UX groups or who is interested in assuming a leadership role in the future.

Genres: Design, Business, Management, Leadership, Nonfiction

312 pages, Paperback

First published May 9, 2011

Reviews

[Ian Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost too much to read. A compendium of literally everything one would want to know about leading a UX team from hiring, to building a lab, including finding room in a budget, to leadership skills, and evangelizing work internally/externally. It’s peppered with real stories from real managers and leaders through the UX field. Kind of an incredible effort though a slog at many points. I might have hit a record number of highlights here. There’s just so much practical and useful stuff in here.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was nice. Not the greatest book ever about the theme I think. If you read a lot about leadership and UX teams you will find the same topics here: office politics, motivation, HR stuff and such.

What I really liked about this book is a quote from Jared Pool on what are the abilities a UX professional should have. There's an entire chapter on this topic. It was written as if you were leading a team and you are the one encouraging your team to grow so there are a few relevant tips even if you are a UX team of one.

Also I really enjoyed a chapter on how to budget for UX activities.

[Noelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've incrementally been reading this for... well it looks like 6yrs now.

There's a lot of really useful information, but it's quite a dense book and really could do with a new edition, not only to be updated with the environmental changes since 2011, but also... there are many design techniques that can support in making the book easier to read as well as updating those diagrams of which content is useful, but very outdated.

I wouldn't usually make a comment about that, but... yknow.. being a user experience book I can't help myself ;)

[Mikal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a labor to complete. I'm not sure if I could recommend completing cover to cover but I do recommend it as a reference manual.

User Experience Management is about the pitfalls and situations managers run into in building and leading effective user experience teams. It tackles such subjects as: if you're building from scratch what discipline would be your primary team, what is a good team composition, should UX sit in engineering or marketing or somewhere else?

Lund has some useful insights, on keeping the conversation from ROI, the importance of building a team culture and other management topics with a UX spin. However he steers clear of the process surrounding the actual work, how he organizes and divides activities, how he runs a team in the middle of a project. Instead he focuses on the administrative concepts like- finding a team identity (hint he puts too much emphasis on visions, missions, etc.) and influencing senior management. As opposed to the intricacies of staging interaction design, user research and visual design work on a given project.

What Lund does excel in is telling a well researched narrative about leading a UX team in a large organization. What you won't find is the information as to how to get the most out of your team in performance, what he focuses on is the system and environment in which your team interacts. These topics are sprawling when covered but they do have useful concepts.

Managers who find themselves leading a UX team that is treated more as an outsourced design agency would find this sprawling but informative read valuable in figuring out how to move up the ladder.


A precautionary note: if you can buy this book in ebook form, the physical book does not look very dense but the layout is not conducive to reading at all, block paragraphs, hyphenated line breaks, and tiny font for the sidebars. How odd it is that so many UX books offer a poor UX for the reader.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does contain valuable information about building UX teams and managing their work. But boy do you have to work for that value! At times it seems Lund is just riffing off the top of his head, so he winds up repeating himself, or writing all over the map before circling around to his point. I found myself wondering whether this book was edited at all.

[Laurian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got a lot out of this book, but it was really long and not very easy to get through. I wish that the points were more pointed rather than conversational.