I’m like Elsa. I went too far.

Originally written in July 2022 (When my kid was 5 😄 ).

There’s a scene in Frozen 2* where Anna warns Elsa of “[going] too far, and you’ll be drowned”. (Context: Elsa was trying to find the source of her power).

10 years ago, I was newly married, pregnant, an independent consultant with a good rhythm of UX research projects, blogging and community talks. I thought “I want to push myself and apply my skills in the stickiest situations”; test my mettle, because I’d already gone through most of the main types of orgs that I could do UX work in.

So, I joined a special opportunity - where a human-centered design team was going to be started at one of my home country’s largest and most conservative banks.

This is not a rant piece. In case that was what you were interested in. I loved the job a lot. I’m the type who can’t stay in a job for years if I don’t love it.

I wanted to test and prove myself - that I could apply my skills in even the toughest of scenarios.

Fast forward to what I learned - is that my passionate, gung-ho style is unsustainable. In a company of 12,000, where your design team of 5-8 people is hoping to spark an appreciation of user-centeredness.

When I say it that way, it sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe I was quite an overconfident person at 34 years old haha.

What I didn’t do early enough?

What interested me was the ability to do hands-on UX work in a corporate environment. Given that it was new to the division, and the company - I expected that others would be in charge of the evangelization, but I realized early on that there needed to be an operational counterpart, led by specialists.

I did do that part. But, I’m an absorbent problem-solver, meaning I like understanding the landscape and data, then tailoring solutions. What I didn’t spend time on sooner was assessing the elements that made digital transformation initiatives I’d been part of effective, and map it versus this environment, to be more insistent of the what needed to be in place.

I only did that task almost 2 years in, after seeing efforts bob and weave in the choppy waves of miscommunication.

I had forgotten basic tenets of working in a monolithic corporate environment, thinking I could just go head-down into the UX work, which was really my love - the usability testing, wireframing, content and product strategy, feature management, prototyping. Those were the things I loved, and hoped to focus on.

I understood that service design was important, and I weaved into my projects. The service design work I did, was in partnership with my business unit counterparts, who need to execute and maintain the digital service. But, I failed to care that learnings and practices needed to scale beyond my direct working team, and also be applied by other workstreams. Scaling work, if you think about it - is a core piece of service design.

(We were initially designed in “Spotify-esque” customer needs-based teams, that were “self-managing” and independent of each other). This necessitates a team that’s geared towards learning. The gap eventually became that each team thrived or failed, depending on the level of experience of the team that was put together, with no feedback loop set up on the effectiveness of the working dynamic.

Again, not scalable. Partially effective, yes, but was eventually part of a larger organizational narrative - of design processes as “unreliable” or having intangible value.

I did my thing, and hoped to keep doing my thing. Since, I’m great at what I do. But, enterprise design work isn’t an individual mission - it can only be achieved by multiple legs of work cooperating towards a goal.

Let’s oversimplify, first. Really, it’s that dangnabbit Spotify model, and the simplified application of it without understanding the critical principles that make it what it is:

• Correspond not just to key customer needs, but around elements of the business model (e.g. platform businesses need a workstream for the “supplier”-side)
• Customer-facing is just one layer of the team topography
• and others.

Anyway, going back to Elsa.

In a core part of Frozen 2, Elsa tries to unravel and understand something she feels called to do, until she starts becoming frozen herself (trapped in the narrative she was trying to follow).

What I observe about myself now, is I lost muscle memory that make/made me effective, and I am gradually relearning them, in a much nimbler, independent environment.

When I read documentation I made from 2020 and earlier, there was much more brevity and clarity for my work docs.

I also recall it was the same for my verbal communication.

John Cutler writes that the higher one goes up the corporate ladder, the work is no longer as directly clear. And, this is what I feel I got trapped in.

One of my favorite elements of UX is Information Architecture, and to the end of my run with the bank, I wanted to focus on cleaning up how to think of the financial services, customer layers and specifications of the “products”. But, perhaps that was part of the downfall - in a highly complex environment, system design is not about creating an all-encompassing model, but an actionable framework.

There will be endless hydra heads, as you go travelling through the forest of corporate decision-making, so one needs to be crystal clear about scope, scenario, target and resourcing. This is the lesson for me, that I wish to take forward in my current role. We’re not a 12,000 person “analog” company, but being fully remote - the need for overcommunication is more intense.

*Low-key (as the young people say) one of my favourite animated films. Also quite obvious that I wrote this as a parent to a 5-year-old.