John Scott Bowie

In 1996, I began teaching a two-day UX workshop to HP's product divisions throughout the US, Europe, Canada and Asia. I had worked at HP for the past 14 years as a manager and engineer/scientist, most recently as a member of HP Corporate Engineering's Design for the User team. Our charter was to research UX best practices from preeminent thought leaders in the field and craft our own HP version of UX design and engineering, a set of essential mindsets, models, and methodologies that would work in a fast-paced, high-tech, multinational corporation with products ranging from PCs and printers, to operating systems and network management software, to oscilloscopes and circuit board testers, to patient care monitors and liquid chromatographs, to DVD-writers and digital cameras—and everything in between. I concluded the workshop with a one-hour session on Navigating the Politics of Change. UX design was a fairly new concept in HP's engineering culture and converts were likely to run up against the corporate immune system when they put my teachings into practice. As an early UX practitioner myself since 1982, I had experienced many of the obstacles my attendees would face and—through trial and error, success and failure—I had learned some strategies for dealing with them. Fast forward 26 years and four companies later—with full-time leadership roles in internal UX teams at GE, UnitedHealth Group. Deloitte, and Edmentum, plus engagements with innovative companies like Microsoft, Intuit, and IBM—and I've encountered a wide range of challenges and opportunities that arise when building and leading internal UX teams. I've discovered that skilled UX practitioners often find their best efforts thwarted by political obstacles. Either they haven't learned how to deal with a corporate culture that doesn't fully grok the value of UX, or they have yet to develop working relationships with other functional teams that are essential for UX initiatives to succeed.