Enterprise UX — Shred #23
Empowered snippet and IxD Personas
Empowered Product Teams
A sample of the book EMPOWERED that I just finished. It is not directly relevant to the Internal IT domain but still a good inspiration. The aspect that strikes me is the interesting inconsistency in the definition of management and manager roles. Management is used as a bad word, representing the legacy command-and-control executives, which IMHO means a strawman argument. I am yet to see an organization proudly label itself as a “command-and-control feature factory”, either now or 20 years ago. The semantic ambiguity between the Leader and Manager wording is not helping us to address bad management practices (process) and bad managers (people). It does not help if we just rename the role and cure a bad process with motivation slogans. BTW in the book, the role of Product Leader is mostly used as a manager of several Product Managers, whereas in the short article we see the role of Director.
Personas
I evolved my product design craft around advocacy for Goal-Directed Design and representing IxD as a repeatable and predictable craft, not a random flash of genius. This tweet is trolling, hilarious hyperbole…unfortunately, often not too far from reality with enterprise and professional apps. I see many Bettys around who want to have some sort of encryption hashes, digital wellness web portals or digitization hybrid working hubs.
Internal Customer
A short and cryptic tweet, and it still resonates on many levels. The word that will keep turning me on internal customer. Internal customer is not really a customer, just a demanding colleague from the same organization, acting in the organizational ambiguity or process vacuum. Instead of pointing to the system and process improvements, we apply the free-market product lingo to cure it away.
