Work done during this project:

• Team management: Leading the BA Design team.
• Team management: Creating a global UX practice space and sync of the Phillipines, India and Buenos Aires team.
• Team Management: Advocacy and leading for change in OLX design teams' mindset about their role: From reactive, on-demand suppliers to system-thinking creators and evangelists of an end-to-end, harmonic experience.
• UX Management: OLX Design System and Design System team internal pitch, creation and coordination.
• UX Management: Transitioning OLX design teams' output from isolated, case-by-case bespoke solutions to a set of coordinated, documented and reusable set of components.
• UX Management: Mentoring and coaching of UI designers into the basics of user research, product design and product management.
• UX Consulting: Facilitating prototyping sessions, moderating and facilitating research collaborative analysis sessions.
• UX Management: Trainning designers and product owners as facilitators as well.
• UX Consulting: Advocacy and mentoring of Product Managers on user-centred, evidence-based design and experience quality measurement.
• UX Consulting for Product Management to define UX and product design team's remit and organizational restructuring.
• UX Management: User-centred research and validation loop set up to procure a participants recruitment line, available research space and gear, assessing maturity state of each team and key members, facilitating agreement on most adequate processes and methods for each stage and define performance indicators for teams and stages.
• UX Management: Planning and coordinating the Design to Tech handover process and Design System collaboration and feedback loops and channels.

The Story

OLX Group is a global online marketplace operating in 45 countries and also the largest online classified ads company in Pakistan, Brazil, India, Bulgaria, Poland, Portugal and Ukraine. It was founded in 2006 and reached 200 million users by 2014.

At the end of 2016, Naspers –the South African and OLX owning– group's board decided to migrate all the OLX products around the world to one global platform. That platform didn't exist and we needed to build it based on the successful letgo MVP we had launched a year before.

Coming from leading a UX team of 2, in a 1 to 5 ratio between UX designers and developers –and being me the only UX lead in the BA global team then– I took the lead and coordination of all the UX related stuff on the new 1 to 10 ratio built team. As the ux/development effort ratio was reduced to a half, so was the ux maturity level of the team compared to our previous one. Therefore, a main part of my role was doing everything possible to negotiate with the management the recovery of a sustainable level of user-centered practices and priorities in our product development processes. The project had been considered only as a migration since the beginning, so there was no properly allocated time for researching, analysing and adapting our product to different user needs and contexts in the original calculations. This made all UX related work particularly difficult given that an approach of feature-set swap from old to new products was taken with a Pareto's line set as success indicator instead of a proper UX workflow.

I also prepared and coached the visual and interaction designers to ramp up in basic ux-related practices such as qualitative product and user research, iterative prototyping and validation, user-focused design processes and practices. We did all this in order to show the first green sprouts of product value resulting of the management trust on "inventing" some time for these, still foreign for them, UX common methods and workflow.
Another key part of my role was to create a common ground between different design teams across the world regarding the UX practice, level of effort, visual and interaction language and priorities in order to reach a cohesive experience in a modular, globally assembled product. I did this by leading the creation of our own Design System under a set of Design Principles that was constantly evolved and maintained by the design team.

During the months we spent in this project I led to:

• implement Lean product strategies, a user-centred validation practice and user-centred design methods.
• designers being trained in the basics of research. First 100hrs. of user tests for the new platform facilitated by them under my supervision and training.
• coordinated UX efforts, methods, principles, acceptance criteria and tasks between Argentina, India and Philipinnes product design teams.
• the creation of the OLX GLobal platform Design Principles and Design System.
• the Design System being integrated into the front-end teams workflows.
• the front-end team collaboration with the design team. Going from approval of design decisions, to earlier involvement and feedback and then to full collaboration, checking whether design was in the loop of product-tech discussions in a timely manner.