I lead research for Workday's oCHRO suite, the company's largest product area. It's been nearly 5 years at Workday, and a lot has changed in that time, particularly in the last year.
When I began my journey with Workday I managed a small cross-discipline team of UX Designers and Researchers, focused on the large challenge of customer deployments. That evolved into leading UI Engineers as we worked as a cross-functional pod tackling some of the toughest UX problems end to end. For three years I led designers directly, before the shape of the work pulled me toward leading research at a larger scale.
Today that's a globally distributed team of 14 researchers, partnering with 4 General Managers and around 10 VPs across the business. The work has shifted too, from the oCHRO product suite to its AI transformation. The interesting research problem there isn't "do users want AI," it's how trust gets built with agents that act on someone's behalf, day after day.
I've seen our UX discipline grow and specialise over the years, and now we've gone full circle, where an individual is expected to have more autonomy, a wider skillset.
What remains important is human-centricity, empathy for our users and a relentless focus on solving their needs.
Just as we thought we had nailed down ways of working and expectations of the UX discipline, the goalposts have shifted. We need to manage that shift within our teams and also with our partners and stakeholders. Leaders have to be Managers of Change. You identify the change agents in your team, set the expectations, put the guardrails up, and create the space. The rest is encouraging people to experiment and evolve at the pace the world is already moving.