Working though ambiguity and lack of initial interest
This project was difficult to start as no one knew what they wanted from this dashboard and some stakeholders even questioned that value in pursuing this idea. Dashboards can have a reputation for being not actionable and a snazzy way to show off that we can do cool things. This was also a user group that we normally do not target in government solution suite. We had to make a lot of assumptions about what this managerial persona may care about.
Feedback session were also vague at times, neither good nor bad feedback was given, making it difficult to know where to pivot. With all of these we continued to persevere, push for answers, and continued to iterate until we hit something that was a great idea
Seeing a product through from ideation to release
My previous experience as a UX designer has always been working on isolated features of a product without much insight onto what happened to the feature after the design cycle is finished.
Sometimes the feature does not get released, sometimes it gets release but we never hear feedback about it again. This time i was involved and kept updated on the sales progress and joined customer calls to collect their feedback.
Working in a small, fast team
This style of working was new to me and those on my team. Traditionally our company has valued shipping out thoroughly tested and developed products. This caused us to move slower and could have equated in some wasted efforts if the products we release did not get traction in the market.
This new working style allowed us to test ideas, which mean I had to accept that we were not always going to have the answers. Actually, most of the time we did not have the answers. This team was meant to test hypothesis, not create something perfect. I learned to really enjoy this aspect of my work.