Abstract

User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams deals with specific issues associated with managing diverse user experience (UX) skills, often in corporations with a largely engineering culture. Part memoir and part handbook, it explains what it means to lead a UX team and examines the management issues of hiring, inheriting, terminating, layoffs, interviewing and candidacy, and downsizing.
The book offers guidance on building and creating a UX team, as well as equipping and focusing the team. It also considers ways of nurturing the team, from coaching and performance reviews to conflict management and creating work-life balance. Furthermore, it discusses the essential skills needed in leading an effective team and developing a communication plan.
This book will be valuable to new managers and leaders, more experienced managers, and anyone who is leading or managing UX groups or who is interested in assuming a leadership role in the future.

*Gives a UX leadership boot-camp from putting together a winning team, to giving them a driving focus, to acting as their spokesman, to handling difficult situations

*Full of practical advice and experiences for managers and leaders in virtually any area of the user experience field

*Contains best practices, real-world stories, and insights from UX leaders at IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and many more!

Few have had the time or opportunity to get the kind of experience that Arnie Lund has had. Our very good fortune is that Arnie is the very essence of the reflective practitioner, and has the generosity of mind and spirit to turn his own career experience not into an autobiography or a "managing as I see it" book of tips.  Instead, Dr. Lund takes a deep and wide look at the kinds of organizations and the different kinds of work that he has seen, from many vantage points, and uses that to engage a remarkable set of colleagues to reflect on, explain, and extend the practice of managing experience design. Arnie has been managing on the edge of the emerging fields involved here for as long as they’ve been emerging.  The breadth of his experience and the discipline of his reflection on it makes for a remarkably comprehensive collection of issues.—Dr. Rick Robinson, Research Fellow, Design Continuum, Boston