I led User Experience for CA Technologies' Incubator group, CA Accelerator. The Accelerator helped employees take a business idea from concept to a viable startup. All of the startups operated independently but received program-level help with UX, marketing, and operations.
To provide UX assistance to twelve independent startups, I recruited and led a multidisciplinary team of UX Strategists, Product Designers, and UX Engineers. The team was a matrixed organization, with most team members dedicated to specific projects, while a Strategist and myself operated at the program-level.
Accelerator used Lean Startup as our core methodology, so knowing our potential customer was pivotal. User Research played a vital role throughout the process. My team helped Founders identify people to interview, write interview scripts, and extrapolate the resulting data. We also coached our Founders against biasing people while interviewing them.
The resulting data would help us formulate the most vital features needed for a Minimum Viable Product. It would also help us identify channels and properties for marketing purposes and clarify our messaging to customers.
MVPs could be physical products or conceptual videos that demonstrated the value of a complete product. A dedicated UX designer would be assigned to a startup to help bring both of these options to life. In most cases, the teams would also continue their research activities to develop personas and iteratively test designs.
One key challenge that we faced was designing for technologies (CI/CD pipeline, Containers, Machine Learning/NLP) that we hadn't previously used. The team made time to attend MeetUps, take courses, and interview people that worked with the technologies to gain a deeper understanding. This education gave us a better understanding of pain points, vernacular for communicating, and our core audience
Accelerator used Lean Startup as our core methodology, so knowing our potential customer was pivotal. User Research played a vital role throughout the process. My team helped Founders identify people to interview, write interview scripts, and extrapolate the resulting data. We also coached our Founders against biasing people while interviewing them.
The resulting data would help us formulate the most vital features needed for a Minimum Viable Product. It would also help us identify channels and properties for marketing purposes and clarify our messaging to customers.
MVPs could be physical products or conceptual videos that demonstrated the value of a complete product. A dedicated UX designer would be assigned to a startup to help bring both of these options to life. In most cases, the teams would also continue their research activities to develop personas and iteratively test designs.
One key challenge that we faced was designing for technologies (CI/CD pipeline, Containers, Machine Learning/NLP) that we hadn't previously used. The team made time to attend MeetUps, take courses, and interview people that worked with the technologies to gain a deeper understanding. This education gave us a better understanding of pain points, vernacular for communicating, and our core audience
The core UX team included: Kyoko Uchida, Heather McLane, Laura Martinez and Sarah Voegeli.
Each incubator had it's own unique brand
Project Jarvis - Data Science dashboard
WhoZoo - Email Scanning Research output (48-hour UXR study)
WhoZoo - Personas
BlueLantern -Landing page
Codepilot.ai - Developer tools assistant
FreshTracks.io - Simplified Kubernetes
Yipee.io - YAML configurator