- Role: Design Lead
- Period: 2019 - 2021
My three years at Quinyx as a Design Lead have been a true turning point in my career. It is my first experience in a product company, and working directly with product managers. That experience will remain a story of hard work, small victories, and long lasting friendships
Quinyx is a product company who develops a workforce management software. It operates in all industries (retail, healthcare, hospitality, operations,...) to enable managers to schedule their staff, and facilitate payroll processes.
When I join Quinyx in 2019, the company is on a super ambitious project: the product that they have been successfully selling for the last 10 years is heavily relying on an aging technology: Flash, which will soon go out of life. Quinyx has 2 years to redesign and rebuild entirely their product front-end, migrate all their users to this new product, and teach them how to use it.
Building a design team
When I join Quinyx, there is already a team of 2 designers, mainly focused on the UI of the product. I realise rapidly that they act more as internal consultants: the developers reach out to them while already working on a solution, if they have questions about some details. The designers have no career path, no perspective of evolution, and no processes in the way they work. As Design Lead, it is part of my role to build the team, and advocate for a design-driven culture internally from scratch.
I decide to focus my efforts on growing the maturity and the motivation of my team. Taking advantage that Quinyx has a very strong product management team, I pair designers with product managers, and encourage them to run product discovery phases together. In addition, we organise usability testing sessions of our product with each new person joining the company. Slowly, the designers get more confortable conducting user research and usability interviews, and meetings with end-users for qualitative interviews become the norm. We are getting to know our personas for the first time, and discover the reality of their work.
Together, we dedicate three hours per week to building our own virtual businesses in the different verticals were we operate the most (retail, hospitality, logistics). Designers for a few hours become restaurant or hotel managers, getting into the culture of “eating our own dog food”.
When I leave in 2021, the design team have exceed expectations in such a constant way that they progressively became core stakeholders in a work process they were completely excluded from before my time. Every sprint demo, they present in 5 minutes their key learnings from the time spent in interviews with users. These presentations are a good way for them to get a high visibility internally, and “recruit” internal subject matter experts for future works.
User centricity evangelist
To reinforce the role of the design team as end-users advocates, I develop working processes where we would iterate much more with our users. We divide our interactions with customers in three categories:
- before starting any kind of design, we organise product discovery interviews with the product mangers. Those are open conversations where we try to discover un-met needs and challenges to later frame our requirements.
- To iterate on our ideas we conduct individual user interviews and focus groups where we present mocks and gather feedback on the relevancy and the usability of the solution(s) proposed.
- Every month, we join some local meet-up events to get random people to test our products.
We also create a knowledge-base in Trello, to sort all the feedback we receive per functional area. These initiatives complement the recent changes for the whole product team who started relying more and more on analytics. The combination of our efforts gathering feedback and the integration of analytics tools enable us to make better informed decisions. As the lead of the team, I work directly with the product management lead to prioritise our roadmap and understand where the different functional teams should focus. Our feedback repository helps us get a “heatmap” of the areas in the product that are creating friction, and opens to more productive value mapping exercises.
Setup our product brand expression
One of my first assignment was to build a design system, to improve the consistency throughout their products (a desktop interface for the managers in charge of building the plannings, and an employee mobile app where task workers can see their planning, punch in and out, swap their shifts and request for leaves).
Further than this, our team, in collaboration with the communication team, have committed to a full rebranding and redesign of all the interfaces.
The redesign of the mobile application was ran in parallel with the company rebranding. My role in this project was mainly focused on mentoring the designers, and setting up our expectations: while the rebranding of the mobile application was supposed to be just a visual update, we used usability testing a lot to advocate for functional improvements, and to anchor our suggestions. The scope of the mobile app rebranding was extended to including many of these improvements suggestions, enabling us to increase our score on the app store from 3,9 to 4,5.
Contribute on strategic projects
As a contributor in two functional teams, I have myself focused on designing the business optimisation part of our product, that would help managers scheduling their staff based on forecasted sales and AI. The challenge for a company like Quinyx to integrate AI in their process for better optimisation, it to make sure that whatever we advise to the manager is in compliance to the local regulations. We were combining data from the cashdesk systems to measure the activity of the businesses, with external factors such as local events, weather forecast, or realtime traffic information to predict affluence and provide staffing recommendations.
When I left the company in 2021, Quinyx had just acquired WidgetBrain, a software company specialised in this field.This part of the product was planned to be the area of focus of the company in the next 5 years. As a contributor in my functional team, I was very involved in the discovery process that would enable us define our requirements (market research, interviews with prospects, work alongside with Sales and Pre-Sales…). I would also deliver high fidelity screens and prototypes, write light specs in JIRA tickets, and I support my team with workshop facilitation (user journey mapping, value mapping…)
Visual storytelling
In the end of 2020, as planned, the technology our product was based on, Flash, goes to end of life, and with it, our old product. The migration to the new product is a success, with about 85% of our functionalities ported, and only 3 customers who decided to churn. The new product receives very positive feedback from its early adopters, and our Sales teams are enthusiastic about selling the new product. Though, in the final rush to complete everything before Flash’s end of life, we have accumulated technical and design debt. For a few months, the R&D team experiences a drop in velocity. the big deadline has passed, we still need to finish wrapping up the last bits, but we suddenly lack of purpose. What’s next? We need a product vision.
The product leadership gathers to assemble a vision that would federate everyone internally around a new goal, and give us back the energy that we are lacking. To support our Chief Product Officer, I initiate a series of stakeholders interview, and ask representatives and leaders of the other departments what would be their vision of our market and product in the next 5 years. Together with our Chief Product Officer and Product Management Lead, we use these interviews to shape our ideas and combine our vision into something tangible. In this context, I realise how powerful is design, enabling us to go beyond market positioning and pure strategy, into illustrations of artefacts that will support the theory and make it tangible to everyone. In just a few weeks, we assemble a video for internal purpose that exposes the direction in which we are planning to go. The video is also presented as a complement to the global strategy to the board members, and is very positively received.