Turning a Tanker

This is a case study on leadership – a tale of vision, relationship-building, patience, plenty of hard graft and a whole lot of grit,  to change a company set in its ways: “It’s moving a tanker, not a sailboat.” Sticking with it can lead to sweeping benefits to the organisation, your team, and your customers – it can even remake your business.

THE SET UP

• My role: Director of Product Design and User Research
• Company: Racing Post / Spotlight Sports Group 
• Departments involved: Product management, Technology, Editorial, Commercial, Marketing, Data intelligence, all P&Ls dealing with design or end user customers

APPROACH AND SOLUTIONS

My first 90 days

Getting User Research going. Qualitative research was seen as skewed, incomplete data due to the nature of its smaller audience set compared to analytics and surveys. But quant typically illuminates what is going wrong, not why it’s going wrong.

I hired a great researcher and promptly asked her to work with our UX designer to put together an Ease of Use study of our site and apps. Then we followed up with studies around betting behaviour and user persona reassessment. These projects exposed the process and behaviours of our key customers when they engaged with our products. This helped shift the view of user research to being seen as a crucial part of the product and even larger strategy development for much of the company. 

Growing the team, bringing in the rigour. To achieve making the product more user centric, I needed to bring in proper UX and UI rigour to the approach and processes. We needed design systems, UX pattern libraries, better briefing processes, more understanding of the business and the current business objectives (that would filter down into design), better communication with delivery and dev. Current products and product roadmaps needed to be interrogated, user needs assessed, KPIs understood. And people on the design and research team needed support, coaching and development. I was determined to get most of these issues addressed with my first 90 days.

Building bridges with other departments. This seems obvious, but the company was amazingly siloed. There was a rebrand on the horizon – something that would touch most departments, form editorial, to marketing, to product, to production, to even HR and facilities. The need to ensure the rebrand was cohesive across all channels created the perfect opportunity for me and my team to build relationships with marketing, editorial, brand and product–to start coordinating design visibility reviews, cohesion workshops, release schedule coordination, and brand asset troubleshooting forums. 

An example of a great crossover piece between design functions was working with editorial to choose a new typeface for editorial content for the rebrand. Print needed a typeface with a lot of styles and flexibility, digital needed something optimised for digital usage. I led the process by working with the Group Racing Editor, his designers and my designers to identify and trial out options in situ then put the top two choices to the full company for a vote. Through this process, the entire company saw the benefits of collaboration and that design was not just pixel pushing, but required thought, planning, contingencies.

The next 275+ days…

Implementing a Design Sprint process. After the rebrand, we had the massive replatforming project on the cards. Overhauling the user experience to be more customer focused was our team’s major objective for the project. And that meant interacting with a mount of stakeholders who still didn’t fully trust user research and didn’t understand or appreciate product design as a discipline.

By implementing a design sprint process and inviting key stakeholders to be part of it at the beginning, the larger project and organisational benefits included:

• Forcing others in the business to reckon with the complexity of designing an experience 
• Reckoning with the uncomfortable assumption-busting that can come with user testing 
• Considering user needs before prioritising and briefing a feature or flow
• Realising that designers and researchers can and should be considered as valuable problem-solvers, not just tactical “resources”
• Witnessing that leadership can come from any level, any discipline, not just the top
• Understanding the difference between giving an opinion and actionable feedback
• Recognising that everyone is doing their best under the circumstances, and that focusing on blame and being stubbornly difficult helps no one
• Appreciating that collaboration across departments and disciplines can produce amazing ideas and solutions

Establishing a cross discipline customer insights forum. We had data coming from several different channels, but we didn’t have a cohesive view of what all of it meant, no holistic view of our users, no visibility of the knowledge gaps of their behaviour.

Within my first year at Racing Post / Spotlight Sports, I spearheaded a customer insights group–bringing together key representatives from user research, analytics, market research, product design and product management together to start sharing insights with each other.

This led to bi-annual reports about our customers in the UK and US markets that gave a “state of play” about what we knew about our customers. This also helped to inform our larger research and data strategy for the following quarters / year  to plug up the holes of customer knowledge that we thought to be business critical to both content and commercial.

Highlighting commercial successes from this new approach to design and research. Some of our most successful (and easiest to quantify) successes came through our B2B team – designing products for end users that would live on bookmaking and media partners’ properties (e.g. retail display units, data modules on websites and apps).

These projects showcased the power of good qualitative research by showing our partners exactly how Racing Post’s products were being used within their ecosystem, the value they brought, and how a responsive, nimble , knowledgeable design team could fix or design new feature based off of user research and fundamentally turn the dial up on our partners’ revenue. Seeing video of a users’ reactions to a new product became a very powerful selling and upselling tool for the business. 

THE ORGANISATIONAL IMPACT

Over the 4.5 years I was with Racing Post / Spotlight Sports Group, here were some of the results of my creative leadership:

1. Design consolidation: More consistency, efficiency, and better quality, more effective product design output. As the company grew through commercial expansion and acquisition, product design teams that had existed outside of my team became part of my department, in some cases, by request by the designers as they wanted/needed the design leadership support, saw opportunities to grow their skill sets, and were keen to collaborate with other designers. This also led to sharing of ideas and methodologies that save the company money (e.g. consolidated design systems), saving the company time (e.g. re-using features, components and insights from one business unit to another for similar features), and generating new, more innovative ideas with a larger, supportive design community to access.
2. Research driving revenue: Qualitative research became a highly respected, highly effective, highly requested discipline by multiple departments as the company started to see the yields from initiatives that benefitted from user research. It got to the point we had to do research prioritisation and budget re-evaluation on a monthly basis to make sure we have enough bandwidth and the researchers were not being overworked!
3. Comprehensive insights providing value to business stakeholders: More communication between design and customer insight departments started to happen, which had a great effect on how other departments interacted with both disciplines, especially around briefing and recognition. The output from these collaborations passed on insights and flagged blindspots with business stakeholders and P&L owners; important things to know when developing or regearing the business strategy for the year.
4. Strategic inclusion: Research and design started to be included in strategic conversations much earlier in the process – ensuring priorities would include some user needs and parts of the user experience that should be addressed, even if the commercial uplift would not be immediate, as the long term benefits would help with engagement, brand loyalty and longer tail revenue streams.
5. Trust and communication yielding more collaboration, more daring ideas: A markedly different atmosphere and ways of communicating started to permeate the business. This wasn’t just down to me – new people joined or were promoted up in the organisation, many with solid digital backgrounds and experience working in different work cultures – I harnessed these attributes where I could and pushed to ensure conversations myself or my team were involved in were productive, actionable, civil, respectful and focused on problem solving vs attributing blame, shared goals vs singular departmental or P&L goals. Modelling better leadership is the best way to encourage it in others.