Reveal:
Contract Flexibility

UX researchers typically work on projects that we think are going to follow a typical template. We work according to our best practices and go through the project phases and steps that we’ve developed for ourselves and for our teams. We recognize that we can sometimes work so early on in the discovery funnel that sometimes, we lose visibility of where our efforts go. So it feels extremely exciting when we get to see our research become a reality.

I recently experienced this with our approach to contracts. I learned a lot about how to collaborate with teammates from areas of the business that I hadn’t worked with before. I also learned how UX Research can make an impact not just by bringing quality insights, but bringing people together. I learned a lot about how long it can sometimes take to make strategic initiatives a reality. And I had a deep and profound sense of appreciation that our hard work resulted in a monumentally better customer experience.

Contract Flexibility: Understanding Customer Context

Something that the UX Research team uniquely provides is information in context. This is because we observe our customers directly, and over time. We can come back to the same customers over and over again to get their takes on iterative developments. It feels like we can revisit on variations of a theme, and the information we get is richer and more complex as we explore together.

So, even before I was formally asked to work on a project exploring options for contract flexibility, our team had already seen this theme come up in our research.

We learned this through all sorts of observations.

For instance: at the beginning of our interviews, we always thank our customers for their time. At that point, customers might mention that we happen to be interviewing them during the “slow” or “off” season, so they have time to join us for these meetings.

Here’s another example: we might get customers signing up for our interviews because they also want to follow-up on a support issue they may be experiencing related to their contracts.

And here’s another common one: when we wrap up our customer interviews, we often ask if there is anything else they’d like to share with our product development teams. We would hear various mentions of needing some sort of flexibility in their contracts, and additional context explaining what that looks like.

When Amelia Tilby, a fantastic service designer, and a dear colleague and friend of mine, invited me to collaborate on this project, you can imagine how thrilled I was!

As she and her teammates were looking for ways to positively transform our business, she had found this opportunity to do some impactful work. She also saw an opportunity for us to leverage UX Research insights.

What’s great is that I didn’t have to start from scratch!

It was 2020, and our team had 3 years of research to refer to as a foundation. I could go back and pull these threads of conversations into a central framework, and provide that framework to a project led by a team that would be responsible for making contract flexibility a reality. Those citations gave us more than just solid, raw insights; they also gave us the necessary context to help understand the need for flexibility. Namely:

• Customers might have downtime, or an off-season, but there would always be a recurring period of activity in a predictable amount of time

• These customers ranged in a variety of verticals with different on/off-season timings, but they might also overlap with each other

• Customers who had this seasonal aspect to their work might also have other businesses that they switch to during the off-season

Having this bedrock of research to build upon meant that we could also better scope new data collection. What we needed to find out were the brass tacks of the offering. One major question that came up was: What time frame did customers want?

Here, I worked with a fantastic UX researcher, Babz JR Hall, to set up the mixed methods research that would help inform this initiative. We surveyed individuals from an open-market pool on SurveyMonkey to get a baseline of what individuals in the market for a fleet management solution would want when it comes to contracts. Here’s what we learned:

Month-to-month and year-long contracts were most favored among our respondents. When combine with the information that we had gathered across our body of UX research, we better understood why. On- and off-seasons often linked with other timelines, like the actual seasons themselves, or according to project or process timelines across a fiscal year.

This contribution showed the unique niche that UX Research can provide. We delivered these findings to our cross-functional teams, and we continued to track these themes over time!

Countdown to Launch:
A Timeline of Impact

Given that our collective teams were carrying the banner for contract flexibility and echoing its message to our leadership for so long, I was thrilled to see contract flexibility launch in February of 2024.

I particularly loved hearing our GM and SVP, Peter Mitchell, echo our customers in his statement:

Ease of doing business is of paramount importance to our customers, and for that - flexibility is key.

Peter’s statement shows that he truly took in our collective insights and supported our teams as they worked to make this offering available to customers.

However, one thing that I directly observed about this process is the time it takes to deliver a highly-strategic solution.

It took several teams, and FOUR YEARS, to make this a reality.

Let that sink in.

I received the official request to work on the project in 2020, and it wasn’t until February 2024 that we saw this come to fruition. In that time, I had moved from Junior Manager, to Senior Manager, to Associate Director. And who knows how long this had been in the pipeline before I even started at the company?

Well, what happened in those FOUR YEARS?

We Collaborated on Action Items

Making contract flexibility a reality required lots of hard work across several teams. Working on this project offered me the opportunity to observe teams outside of the Experience team, and even outside of the Product organization as a whole.

Here are the main teams that I got to collaborate with, and how we worked together:

• Service Design

  • Identified this as a key strategic area that could benefit from organizational design and future visioning

  • Brought key stakeholders together for alignment

  • Mapped the as-is customer journey and the to-be customer journey, layering in our collective research insights as evidence for all design decisions

• Sales & Marketing

  • Shared insights from customer calls, customer feedback, and market research studies examining product-market fit of our offerings

  • Promoted contract flexibility upon release

• Product, Engineering, & Deployment

  • Created the tools, systems, and portals needed to support transactions and updates

  • Brought together and empowered internal teams to help support customers navigating flexible options for their contracts

From time to time, I and the UX Research team would weigh in on foundational questions about feedback that we might have gotten from customers related to themes of flexibility in their work. But it is truly because of these teams that contract flexibility is an offering today.

We Also Echoed Each Other Across the Business

Working together allowed us to build bridges and support each other’s work throughout the company. I certainly would leverage Marketing’s research to help show where our data aligned, and as a result, made those insights stronger. I also learned more about what is necessary to set up these systems internally: how complex our systems can get, how there is an added layer of accommodating our parent company’s systems and processes, and how to effectively roll out trainings about the offerings to customer-facing agents.

Through this experience, another thing that I learned is the importance of communication. After presenting our information to the executive leadership team / ELT, I didn’t really see many updates about the project. I learned about the 2024 launch partially through our internal grapevine, but mostly through a team email.

Given our UX Research team’s ongoing discussions about tracking impact, I wondered what it might look like if that communication had been more consistent and accessible, especially when we are doing work that is so early in the discovery phase, and further away from delivery. How could I make outcome tracking and impact tracking better for my teammates, who are now starting to work on strategic initiatives like these?

Evolving UX Research:
Turning One-Off Projects into a Thematic Body of Work

This experience really drove home the need of a maturing UX Research team to create a research hub.

At this point, I was only year 3 into my role, and a brand-new junior UX Research manager. I didn’t yet have the experience or savviness of onboarding tools. And our team was still a relatively small team; we hadn’t yet become the global machine that we are today.

So when I went back to the research that we had to build our foundational literature base on contract flexibility, we had to do manual searches, and use a team swarm, to find those studies.

This may look way too simplistic, but hey — with time and elbow grease, we were able to do document our research and find what we were looking for!

Given our team’s growth and scope now, though, this approach admittedly does not scale well.

So, in 2020, I successfully advocated for budget for a tool to be able to help us do this in a more automated and ingrained way.

We started to use Dovetail, which is an amazing research repository, but also an incredible collaborative tool. From AI generative summaries of research, to collaborative canvases, to ways to tag, highlight, and search projects for key moments and captioned video clips, Dovetail had and still has the perfectly-scoped solution for our needs in this stage of our UX Research team evolution.

Most importantly, tools like Dovetail allow us to have a broader view of research themes over time.

Since onboarding our team and processes into Dovetail, we’ve thought about different ways to organize our research. Here are some examples:

Our UX Research team is constantly discussing how to organize our research in ways that are accessible and curated, as well as optimized for search, whether manual or supported by AI.

One way that our research coordinator Iris Barrera has helped us do this is by thinking about the taxonomies that teams use to refer to their research. Check out her talk here!

And tune in on October 3, 2024 to hear me and Iris chat about how we’re organizing our research not just by theme, but also in order to prepare for broader communications with leaders. This is especially pertinent for strategic projects like the contract flexibility initiative!

I’m curious to learn more about how others are thinking about their repository strategy. How are you bringing your internal stakeholders along with you? Do you experience any unique challenges within your organization? How are things going? Reach out if you’ve got thoughts to share!

Summary

I’m still learning about how to track UX Research across product development, from discovery to delivery. I’m also still learning how to engage different stakeholders across bodies of work in order to inform and influence strategic initiatives. But the biggest thing that I celebrate from this project is that I was able to make a significant contribution to an organization-wide project that made our customer experience better!

Want to learn more about my industry experience? Go back to my Industry Experience page to see my other Key Strategic Projects, my experience in Team Management, and my milestones in Career Development!

Or, head back to my main Portfolio page to learn more about me!